Alienation and Self-Cultivation

Thesis Statement:

Identities are constructed through a process of identification by the actors for those who are sources of meaning.

Argument

Trace Jasmine's development from Jyoti to Jasmine to Jase to Jane. What does she gain (or not gain) with each new identity?

Jasmine has shown as a character who tries to fit in in an environment where she does not belong to. Jasmine's development into several identities made her being acceptable in the society she was living in. African American typically holds minority position in White American dominant state. Consider the classic research on racial difference in the United States and how Black Americans are often viewed negatively by prejudiced White Americans in order for White Americans to bolster their own self-esteem. Skinheads also link their self-identities to false claims of superiority to Jews, African Americans, and others.

Major themes include immigration and assimilation; hyphenated American identities and the joys and sorrows of becoming American; the American Dream; the promise of the frontier and the open geography of the American landscape; multiple migrations and the diasporic worlds of refugees and illegal migrant workers; reincarnation and self-naming and renaming; violence and nurturance; the conflict between Old World duties and New World wants and desires; the impact of Sikh terrorism in India in the 1980s; and ethnic ghettoization of Indian immigrants who live in the ossified, re-created Indias in Queens, New York. Mukherjee's novel lends itself to positive feminist readings as she attributes to the female protagonist the power of the Hindu goddess of destruction, Kali, and male gods from the Hindu Trinity such as Shiva the Destroyer with the "third eye" and Vishnu, the Preserver, with the universe in his belly (Hoppe, 137).

The conceptual framework of personal identity includes social construction of identity via the generalized other, communication, “I” and “Me” of identity, and the evolution ...