Immigrant Narratives of an Engendered American Dream: A Reading of Bharati Mukherjee's "The Middleman and Other Stories"

The Middleman and Other Stories (1987) by the South Asian American author Bharti Mukherjee, one of the first literary voices of the Indian American diaspora, offers a revisionary and somehow subversive response to nativist ideologies about nation and citizenship in the US culture and literature. As this essay discusses, Mukherjee's narrative characters, all immigrants of first or second generation and all coming from a variety of historical and ethnic backgrounds, are strategically re-inscribed and re-articulated within the mythological imagery traditionally associated to such ideologies. This study explores the way Mukherjee's fiction - in representing new Americans-in- the-making - enacts and enlightens the relation between “self” and “other”, and articulates the deep sense of instability and uncertainty that characterizes the contemporary moment of global diasporas.