المستخلص: |
Extrapolated from Simone de Beauvoir’s statement that “one is not born but rather becomes a woman”, this paper reads Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine as a narrative that revises Americanness as a case of doing rather than of being. It further engages with Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, stretching it from the field of gender studies to the field of cultural studies, to examine the way Jasmine’s iterative citations of the mainstream American cultural norms de-essentialize the naturalness and fixedness of cultural identity and redefine what it means to be an American. In conjunction with the study of Jasmine's theatricalization of identity, this paper approaches Jasmine's quest for belonging as an ongoing negotiation of the overarching standards that shape the nation's cultural identity, rather than passive assimilation, which conventionally coerces the immigrant to be unassertive and receptive. Her cultural performativity of Americanness, which balances passivity and activity, demonstrates that her "transformation is a two-way process". It reveals Mukherjee’s ability to transform the cultural outsider into a hero of the American foundational myths, one who enacts a subversion from within in order to give birth to a New American identity.
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