Of cityscapes, affect and migrant subjectivities in Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss revolves around questions of identity and entities flawed by a deep sense of deprivation and loss left by colonization that manifests itself in various forms through generations. The novel chronicles the lives of an Anglophile Indian judge, Jemubhai Patel, whose educational sojourn in Britain permanently brands him as an alien both abroad and in his homeland, and of his orphaned 16-year-old granddaughter Sai, her tutor/lover Gyan, and Patel’s cook who pushes his son, Biju, to go seek his fortune in America. This paper seeks to discuss the lives of Jemubhai and Biju as it tracks the role of the city and its impact on the construction of their identities. This impact factor is further analyzed through affective theory, namely Jose Munoz’s concept of “disidentification,” a tactic of survival by which minoritarian subjects either consciously or unconsciously “neither assimilate nor strictly oppose the dominant regime.”

the psyche of the subject. This discourse of place and space becomes exponentially complicated in Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss as the narrative alternates between Kalimpong in India and New York City in the United States of America. It tracks the lives of an expatriate judge, Jemubhai Patel, his orphaned 16-year-old granddaughter, Sai, her tutor/lover, Gyan, and Patel's cook, who pushes his son, Biju, to go seek his fortune in America. This paper tracks the lives of Jemubhai Patel and Biju, aiming to discuss how the cities they inhabit, Cambridge, Kalimpong and New York, have an impact on their identity, and how postcolonial novels like the Inheritance of Loss become the site of articulation of such discourses. My analysis specifically focuses on the impact factor, what I call the affect, after Jose Munoz and his theory of disidentification.
My article has been written for this special issue, Migrant Narratives and the City, that focuses on the role of affect in urban encounters. My contribution draws on theories of affect, urban space and colonial hauntology, initiating a dialogue between them to better understand colonized/migrant subjectivity in its capacity to affect and be affected by the urban space it inhabits and the colonial brooding it cannot erase. Exploring racism, marginalization and discrimination in Desai's Inheritance of Loss, my paper moves on to evaluate how feelings of loss and trauma are transmitted through generations (Cvetkovich 2003;Bell 2007;Gordon 2008) as "negative affect" (Dragojlovic 2018, p. 94). In my final assessment, however, I rely on Jose Munoz's concept of disidentification as it provides an affective critical lens that opens up new venues of consideration: though Jemubhai, the judge, stands fossilized, a victim to colonial hauntology, Biju builds on an attitude that is akin to Munoz's strategy.
Immigrant experience in the novel has been explored by several critics both in postcolonial studies and in spatial studies. While Masterson (2010) argues that Desai's text provides a "re-grounding" of some of the more optimistic renderings of diaspora narratives, David Spielman (2010) proposes that postcolonial subjects should embrace multiculturalism rather than maintain a rigid difference. Showing the inadequacy of the readings of Masterson and Spielman, Jackson (2016) interprets the Inheritance of Loss as a cosmopolitan novel that critiques interrelated historical processes, such as imperialism, colonialization and even postcolonialism, which leave their generational mark on various characters. Sinha (2019) analyzes this generational loss and trauma as a collective experience of abjection, evoked by the narrative technique of free indirect discourse as a coping mechanism. From abjection, literary criticism turns to shame as the affective residue of diasporic displacement. Zlatan Filipovic, for instance, calls shame "an affective residue of the unsalvageable past [of immigrants] in the experience of displacement," one that the diasporic subject seeks to use as a tool of identification manifested in mimicry (2017, p. 205).
The relation between affect theory and postcolonial studies resides in the realm of the political. Affect is generally defined as non-cognitive expression that involves emotions and feelings. Brian Massumi, however, calls affect a non-conscious "intensity" (2002, p. 27). Paul Sharrad develops this non-conscious experience into one that is "biologically located and experienced, but [is] socially responsive and culturally modulated" (2012, p. 56). This cultural modulation in any postcolonial society naturally harks back to imperial dominance that characterized the hegemonic order in colonial times and propagated it through literature. Given the milieu, affect theory becomes a potent tool of power as and when we enter the arena of politics. As Nigel Thrift points out: "Affect has always been a key element of politics and the subject of powerful political technologies which have knotted thinking, technique and affect together in various potent combinations" (2004, p. 64). The ramifications of affect take on fascinating forms in postcolonial literature. In Inheritance of Loss Jemubhai identifies himself with the dominant regime once he beholds a portrait of Queen Victoria in his school. This politics of power has an impact on Jemu's identity as he leaves India to study abroad in Cambridge. He looks forward to acceptance and assimilation into the white culture. Unfortunately, his reception in Cambridge is horrifying. He is discriminated and shunned by the British. But strangely enough, even though he should have hated the British for the way they treated him, he starts to despise his family and countrymen. How and why this happens remains a mystery, baffling critics studying the mind of the colonized. With the "affective turn" in postcolonial studies one hopes to provide some answers to these perplexing questions and open up new avenues to study the colonized psyche. As opposed to Jemubhai, Biju's attitude is more balanced. One may rely on Bill Ashcroft's notion of "a sophisticated affective response" to describe his stance: a "sly" reaction that agrees on face value and pretends to comply but actually registers resistance to mainstream culture and its directives (Postcolonial Studies 2007, p. 7).
Building on the affective turn in literary and cultural studies my analysis of Jemubhai and Biju show how both characters, traumatized by their diasporic displacements, react to what Rashmi Varma calls the colonial and neo-colonial hauntings of the cityscapes they inhabit. Do they identify with the places they reside in, or do they resort to what Jose Muñoz calls a process of disidentification, "neither assimilat[ing] nor strictly oppos[ing] the dominant regime" (Muñoz 1999, p. 16)? Munoz goes on to clarify that "disidentification" is a process, "a working on, with, and against a form at a simultaneous moment" (2000, p. 70). Muñoz's concept of disidentification includes exploration of queer identities, as well as migrant subjectivities of different race and color. Of particular interest to my paper is Munoz's take on ethnicity as a performative flexible, one that releases ethnicity from a fixed given and defines it as a mobile understanding of "affective difference…in which various historically coherent groups 'feel' differently and navigate the material world on a different emotional register" (Munoz 2000, p. 70). Both Jemubhai and Biju stand affected by the memory of the colonial trauma 1 they carry within them; kept alive by the cities they inhabit in their displaced condition. Yet the way they navigate their material reality is vastly different.
The stories of Jemubhai and Biju illustrate the devious ways by which a colonial hangover persists and percolates down through generations. Their stories are influenced by the traumatic memory of an inherited loss, a long-distance affect of colonization, played out in colonial, postcolonial and neo-colonial venues. Both Jemubhai and Biju remain trapped by this distant memory as they succumb or reclaim agency for themselves. Affect theory, I believe, brings to the fore the unpredictability of human nature that depends on how one reacts to the trigger of affect and the milieu that causes it.
Before we proceed further I would like to explore the different cityscapes, embedded in particular time periods, which have an impact on Jemubhai and Biju. In fact, with Jemubhai, we encounter two divergent cityscapes that influence him and contribute to the ways in which his identity is formed. Jemu's first encounter with Cambridge is deeply ingrained in what Daniel Bell calls "the rational cosmology": a worldview according to which England was an iconic symbol of order and containment at the height of colonial rule (1975, p. 19). Any foreigner, like Jemubhai, was an outsider, an alien considered an "assault on national integrity" (Hall 2015, p. 854). The alienation and discrimination he suffers have a significant impact on his personality. By the time Jemubhai retires in India and moves to Kalimpong, a hill station on the foothills of the Himalayas, we see how he becomes a victim of what Rashmi Varma describes as a postcolonial city. Varma defines the postcolonial city as "conjunctural space" where "historical events, material bodies, structural forces and representational economies…propel new constellations of domination and resistance,…and the formation of new political subjects" (2012, p. 1). Kalimpong is a case in point as it represents a "palimpsest of a messy colonial history" that affects the retired judge, Jemubhai and the anti-nationalist insurgents in a postcolonial India (Varma 2012, p. 16). Biju, on the other hand, inhabits a First World global city, New York, a western metropolis where a great number of Third World immigrants live. An illegal immigrant, Biju recalls the abject natives of colonial rule who have acquired a new name in the neo-colonial reality of capitalist New York-the exploited laborers who contribute to the success of capitalism unrecognized. And yet, Biju in his various responses to the city life of New York, challenges the traces of colonial rule in New York's cityscape and some characters who inhabit it. Influenced by the various cityscapes both Jemubhai and Biju "perform affect," that is, "a certain mode of 'feeling brown' in a world painted white, organized by cultural mandates to 'feel white'" (Munoz 2000, p. 68). Given that Munozian disidentification is "neither identification nor counter identification-a working on, with and against a form at a simultaneous moment," this paper contends that Jemubhai fails to create a new subject position because of his rigidity whereas Biju succeeds in creating an "identity-in-difference" lithe in its flexible performativity (Munoz 2000, p. 67).

Colonial hauntings
Desai's novel pays close attention to how space is created; how by putting its stamp on places, such as educational institutions, colonization left indelible marks on young native minds skewing them up forever. Born into a poor, lower caste family, Jemubhai had the good luck of attending Bishop Cotton School only when his father made money by perjuring witnesses in court. As the only son, he was given the best education the family could afford. Jemubhai's dreams of succeeding in life are determined by a strange colonial haunting, an "always-already" absent presence that works as a signifier of distant control (Derrida 1972, p. 73), As he looks at a portrait of Queen Victoria "in a dress like flouncy curtain, a fringed cape, and a peculiar hat with feathery arrows shooting out" (Desai 2006, p. 66) he finds her froggy expression compelling, feeling "deeply impressed that a woman so plain could also have been so powerful. The more he pondered this oddity, the more his respect for her and the English grew" (Desai 2006, p. 66). The ridiculous dress, which holds up the distant colonial power to instant ridicule, has a rather strong impact on the young Jemu. For as Jemu muses over the plainness of Queen Victoria's expression he not only feels a deep respect for her power but also seeks to assuage his weak native being by finding his manhood in "her warty presence" (Desai 2006, p. 66). Jemubhai's identification at this point is complete: herein begins his stagnation.
Victim of a delusional sense of power coupled with a self-damning sense of inferiority, Jemubhai becomes a monster in the novel. Subsequent behavioral anomalies of Jemubhai all emanate from the calamitous contradiction between his plainness and a sense of borrowed power that makes his parents, his wife, and even his granddaughter's tutor victims of his gross abuse. Jemubhai's skewed masculinity feeds into the injustice he metes out to his parents. The maltreatment remains a pathetic manifestation of his acquired masculinity, an outgrowth of his admiration for the Queen's power that kindles his desire to emigrate, buy into a superior status and belittle his native cultural values. To quote Frantz Fanon, Jemu feels he is situated in a "hostile world…[that]represents not merely a hell from which the swiftest flight possible is desirable, but also a paradise close at hand… (1963, p. 53). Thus, as he leaves the shores of India for England, he is ashamed of his father, "a barely educated man venturing where he should not be" (Desai 2006, p. 42). He throws the food his mother had prepared for him overboard, which is described as the product of "undignified love, Indian love, stinking, unaesthetic love" (Desai 2006, p. 43). In seeking emotional and spatial distance from his family, Jemubhai's alienation is complete for "[n]ever again would he know love of a human being that wasn't adulterated by another contradictory emotion" (Desai 2006, p. 42). It is pathetic to watch Jemubhai as he hallucinates about the empowering promises of travel around the globe, as he leaves the shores of India for England. What proves to be a fleeting "masculine" moment for Jemu ultimately reveals and reinstates his weak, marginalized position, stuck in a condition that virtually consumes him.
Jemubhai's psychological identification with the white man receives its first jolt when, in his academic sojourn in Britain, his grandiose dreams of England are punctured. The Cantabrigian cityscape where he goes seeking rental accommodation is bleak and dreary: "tiny gray houses in gray streets stuck together and down as if on a glue trap" (Desai 2006, p. 44). The cityscape has a strong impact on Jemubhai. He is unimpressed by what he sees; his dreams of arrival to the "Land of Hope and Glory" are shattered by the reality of the cityscape. The way local landlords shut their doors on him drives him almost to the brink of desperation. He "visited twenty-two homes before he arrived at the doorstep of Mrs. Rice on Thorton Road" (Desai 2006, p. 44). Even Mrs. Rice, who finally rents him a room, does not do so out of compassion, but just because "she needed the money and …she was concerned she wouldn't be able to find a lodger at all" (Desai 2006, p. 44). The run-down neighborhood, particularly the marginalized location of Mrs. Rice's house "on the other side of the train station from the university" portrays the locational ostracization that radically contributes to Jemubhai's demoralization. He becomes the target of vicious racial stereotyping: elderly women move away from him when he sits next to them in the bus (Desai 2006, p. 45). The "psychogeographic" map of the city, to borrow a term from the Situationist art movement in 1950s Paris, sorely impacts Jemubhai's disposition (Lindeke). As the sights and sounds of the everyday cityscape come alive and seek to threaten his very being, Jemubhai recedes into his shell. He becomes a recluse, a victim of acute depression that Munoz calls an "affective site," the product of "a feeling of brownness that transmits and is structured through a depressive stance, a kind of feeling down" (Munoz 2006, p. 676).
Munoz, building on Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak's article titled "Can the Subaltern Speak?", raises another question: "Can the subaltern feel?" Or rather how does he feel? According to Munoz, the "brown feeling" characterizes the subaltern who cannot fit into the protocols of mainstream behavior and yet strives to do so. In the case of Jemubhai this takes a strange turn as he succumbs to the blatant racial discrimination of the local inhabitants and feels more and more isolated. As a direct result of social isolation Jemubhai "retreated into a solitude" till "[t]he solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow" (Desai 2006, p. 45). He falls a prey to demeaning psychological constructs that, as Frantz Fanon puts it, blinds the colonized to his subjection to the white man's tenets and norms and in the process alienates his consciousness. As a result, Jemubhai's "mind had begun to warp; he grew stranger to himself than he was to those around him, found his own skin odd-colored, his own accent peculiar" (Desai 2006, p. 45). Permanently affected and yet rejected by the English culture, Jemu internalizes colonial prejudices to develop a sense of self-hatred wherein "[h]e envied the English… loathed Indians" (Desai 2006, p. 131). Despite his attempts to mimic English culture and whiten himself Jemubhai never becomes Homi Bhabha's "mimic man," "a reformed, recognizable Other… as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite" (1994, p. 8). Bhabha's mimic man is built on resemblance to the mainstream culture that endorses a discourse of similarity but also threatens to dismantle and destabilize it at will. Jemubhai never portrays this ambivalence. He internalizes colonial prejudices, without really acknowledging the damage done by this attitude, and turns it against his own people.
In Trauma: A Genealogy Ruth Leys argues that when trauma fails to register in one's consciousness, it does not disappear but remains in an unintegrated state in one's mind. This leads to the victims of trauma dissociating themselves from the source of trauma by way of an amnesic denial. Jemubhai is in the throes of such a denial when he returns to India, one that surfaces in his obsessive paranoia, described by Munoz as "numb repetition" (Munoz 2006, p. 682). He expects his family to be impressed and awed by him, yet they only laugh at the grotesque caricature he has become. In a possible bid to compensate for his own inferior Indianness, Jemubhai repeatedly and compulsively abuses his wife. He hates her "typically Indian bum-lazy, wide as a buffalo" and physically abuses her when he discovers footprints on the toilet seat, ranting in delirium: "[S]he was squatting on it, she was squatting on it!", and taking "her head and push[ing] it into the toilet bowl" (Desai 2006, p. 189). When Jemu discovers that his wife had taken his precious powder puff, symbolic of the whitening he craves, he loses his mind. He grabs his wife, "clamped down on her, tussled her to the floor, in a dense frustration of lust and fury-penis uncoiling, mottled purple-black as if with rage, blundering, uncovering the chute he had heard rumor of-he stuffed his way ungracefully into her" (Desai 2006, p. 186). Clearly, Jemubhai's brutal sexual act is a punishment he metes out to her for her transgression. Despite his intense loathing, he persists in forcing an uncouth, almost savage, act of sex, which reveals the ways in which the humiliating remnants of his past influence his obsessive and aggressive behaviour.
Jemubhai's obsessive cycle of physical abuse later takes the form of psychological persecution too. His deep-rooted sense of shame emanating from his internalized inferiority drives him to despise and embarrass others like Gyan, his granddaughter's tutor. To exonerate himself from the insults he himself had been forced to endure in England when he had been asked to recite a poem from memory, Jemubhai asks Gyan to recite a poem and mocks him by laughing "in a cheerless and horrible manner" (Desai 2006, p. 120). Overall, his wife and Gyan seem to bear the brunt of the way he had been treated in England. By internalizing racial hatred, but never admitting the fact, Jemubhai reinstates his victimized status as he remains stuck in a psychological space defined by the trauma of colonialism.
Even in his retirement, Jemubhai fails to employ the Muñozian strategy of disidentification. He retires early to isolate himself from the lesser Indian mortals; in actuality, this is his defense mechanism to deal with his affected psyche, as he becomes an alien in his own country. But for the time being the judge resides in borrowed splendor. He buys a house in Kalimpong, Darjeeling in the hills, the geographical elevation bequeathing him with a sense of power that feeds his ego. The house belonged to a Scotsman. The former colonial ownership makes it more attractive for Jemubhai. His swashbuckling entry on horseback, as he "pushed open the door into that space lit with a monastic light, the quality of which altered with the sunlight outside," naturally helps him to feel that "he was entering a sensibility rather than a house," a sensibility that assured him of colonial splendor (Desai 2006, p. 32). The space augments his being and bestows him with a sense of glory. As Bill Ashcroft in Postcolonial Transformation points out, "to inhabit place is, in a variety of ways, to inhabit power" (2001, p. 172). Jemubhai's choice of the location of the house, along with his power to impose his will upon this space to manipulate its representation to suit and pander his egotistical needs, exemplifies Ashcroft's theoretical stand.
It also brings to the fore how Jemubhai, the judge, becomes "ossified," made into a virtual laughingstock by his being an "affected anomaly" in the throes of the postcolonial town of Kalimpong (King 1985, p. 8). During colonial rule, Darjeeling and Kalimpong, initially considered as vacational paradises for Europeans, soon became health resorts. After 1864 Darjeeling was the official summer capital of the Bengal Presidency (as Calcutta, now Kolkata, was the de facto capital of British India till the early twentieth century). By 1947, when India became independent, socioeconomic problems of the region, ignored under British rule, had really escalated. Issues of regional autonomy and recognition of Nepali as an official language by the Constitution of India brought about the Gorkha movement in the 1980s. No more the exclusive abode of the European elite or of wealthy Indian urbanites, Darjeeling, now a district that included Kalimpong, became a typical postcolonial town where regionalized issues had brought on class tensions, chaos, and violence. Jemubhai's inability to acknowledge the changing political realities of Kalimpong, now a hotbed of GNLF (Gorkha National Liberation Front) insurgency and violent secessionist politics, make him a pathetic fossil of the colonial era, who is mocked and brutalized by his own people.
The 1980s political turmoil created havoc with civilian lives and particularly with a fossilized animation of a bygone era, a colonial remnant, like the judge, Jemubhai. When the Gorkha boys steal from Jemubhai's home, they find "a dusty row" of guns and bottles of "Grand Marnier, amontillado sherry, and Talisker"-the contents of which "evaporated completely and some had turned to vinegar" (Desai 2006, p. 8).
The guns and bottles are mere remnants of a glorious past over which the dust had settled with the passing of time. The house and its artifacts, like the Judge himself, have fallen into disarray and decay: "It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, contained by stone walls several feet deep…The walls were singed and sodden…thickets of soot clumped bat like upon the ceiling" (Desai 2006, pp. 1, 2). A genteel poverty seems to peek through as the Gorkha insurgents take advantage of the situation. They humiliate the Judge; make him repeat at one point, "I am a fool" (Desai 2006, p. 8). His cringing acquiescence makes him a coward bereft of any dignity. It is interesting to notice how the now decrepit house, an architectural landmark on the cityscape, has whittled down the judge's former grandeur to a pathetic farce. The tragedy of the Judge is that he never comes to terms with the affects that haunt him due to the unacknowledged traumatic experience in England. He therefore lives on as a parody of an Englishman, ridiculed by the GNLF insurgents, who in the meantime have wrenched the colonial space of Kalimpong to write their own narrative of rebellion. Trapped in a postcolonial town, the judge fails to deal with the insurgents, the "new political subjectivities created through the very processes of marginalization… on the one hand, and decolonization…on the other" (Varma 2012, p. 14).

Neo-colonial cityscape
For Biju, an immigrant to the United States of America, the City of New York is a significant location. In sharp contrast to Cambridge, New York City speaks of an "angular fixity" and a "spatial order that reinforces social order, including class distinctions" (Ferguson 2009, pp. 38-39). This urban center, as a conceptual space, also forms the crux and core of power that feeds into the notion of the American Dream. For quick assimilation, the city demands the denial of one's roots and a recognition of a celebratory heterogeneous space, and immigrants entering the city often become trapped by the allure of the urban place and the promise of the Dream. New York is a virtual depiction of what Henri Lefebvre calls "representational space." This space "is alive… [as] it embraces the loci of passion, of action and of lived sit-uations…." (1991, p. 42). All human beings are deeply connected to the place they belong, and any story of displacement disrupts this bond of identity and belonging.
Due to the immigrants' geographical displacement and the hardships they face in an alien country, New York City becomes what Marc Auge calls a "non-place", a transient space that never holds any particular significance for the person and so lacks the resonance of a place. In Biju's case a disassociation with New York is brought on by the burden of historical trauma that he already carries with him. New York, therefore, remains a non-place for Biju, as he never forgets his Indian roots and never assimilates into American culture. Biju is stuck between the two cultural spaces, a "migrant soul," whose "identity components occupy adjacent spaces and are not comfortably situated in any one discourse of minority subjectivity" (Munoz 1999, p. 32). He incarnates Munoz's "migrant soul" perpetually, permanently in transit, a differently defined hybrid identity, "travelling back and forth from different identity vectors" (Munoz 1999, p. 32).
In New York, Biju has to deal with intensive racialized bias and stereotyping; however, the discrimination he faces is no more than an offshoot of his own inherited colonial resentment towards racialized others, a classic case of Muñozian disidentification. As a member of the underground community of undocumented immigrants in the United States, Biju interacts with people of other races and ethnicities that previously he has only encountered through hearsay. Biju's interactions with other minorities sometimes leave him confounded. At one point, his prejudice towards black people, people of other religions, and even other minorities falter. Biju's reactions to Saeed Saeed, a black Muslim from Zanzibar, are complex: "Saeed was kind and he was not Paki. Therefore, he was OK?… Therefore, he liked Saeed, but hated the general lot of Muslims?…Therefore he hated all black people but liked Saeed?" (Desai 2006, pp. 85, 86). Despite his hatred fueled by his hostility towards Muslims, an aftermath of the partition of India and Pakistan, Saeed becomes one of Biju's closest friends and alters his perception of race and religion.
Biju successfully steers his course via the simultaneity of disidentification. The atmosphere of the U.S. embassy speaks of a strict policing of admittees to the United States, and Biju is quick to buy into this sort of restriction. Waiting in infinite lines for his turn, Biju "noticed that his eyes, so alive to the foreigners, looked back at his own countrymen and women, immediately glazed over, and went dead" (Desai 2006, p. 201). His strong racial prejudices resurface when he recalls having heard other Indians discussing how to frame the purpose of their visit to the United States: "We'll say a hubshi 2 broke into the shop and killed our sister-in-law and now we have to go to the funeral" (Desai 2006, p. 202). As Biju listens to the excuses, he is quick to judge others as he picks up the neocolonial racist frame of mind, "where every nationality confirmed its stereotype" (Desai 2006, p. 25). Despite his prejudice, Biju is clearly aware of his precarious position as an illegal immigrant in New York. When Mr. Iype, the Indian deliveryman for India Abroad, suggests that political asylum seekers should be sent back to their home countries, Biju's repartee is quick: "Why are we sitting here?" (Desai 2006, p. 251). Biju's rejoinder exposes the irony of Iype's comment; it also brings to the fore an essential modification in Biju's own response to racialized others, a fascinating mutated form of colonial prejudice subverted by the experience of immigrant life in New York.
As a result, Biju emerges as an "observer-participant", which is an attitude typical of displaced individuals (Clifford 1992). When Saeed-Saeed catches a mouse that was supposedly eating the bread in the restaurant, he "kicked it up with his shoe, dribbled it, tried to exchange it with Biju…tossed it up till it came down dead" (Desai 2006, p. 103). Has Saeed-Saeed internalized the harsh ill treatment meted out to him on his arrival in America? Is he now possibly transferring it onto the rodent and deriving sadistic pleasure out of the despicable act? The harshness of survival seems to have created pathological brutes of both Saeed-Saeed and Biju. Yet there is a marked difference between the two: for while Saeed-Saeed seems consumed by the compulsive re-enactment of violence, Biju remains a keen bystander. Saeed-Saeed's sadistic behavior emanates from not one experience, a given moment or a particular event, but an accumulation of dispersed, dynamic affective flows that find exit in a moment of bodily outrage. Biju neither identifies with the mainstream culture that brutalizes minorities (metaphorized by the rodent) nor does he disassociate himself totally from dominant ideology.
Biju takes on the disidentified subjectivity position again when he is a delivery boy in a Chinese food outlet. Eavesdropping on the comments of Indian female students who do not want "a nice Indian boy who's grown up chatting with his aunties in the kitchen" but the Americanized Indian, a "Marlboro man with a Ph.D.," Biju is appalled (Desai 2006, p. 56). His disgust is made up of "a mixture of emotions: hunger, respect, loathing" (Desai 2006, p. 57). He reverts to his native culture as he fortifies himself against the newly minted Westernized desires, mocking the Anglicized Indian students as "he put two fingers to his lips and whistled into the window at the girls," then singing the Hindi film song This girl is crazy for me to them (Desai 2006, p. 57). Driven to compensate for the rejection he faces from all quarters, he nimbly retaliates against his own diaspora. Moreover, the minute he does this Biju buys into the reactionary narrative of affect that makes him part of the discourse he wants to escape or even subvert. In a fascinating reversal of the colonial gaze of power, Biju claims back his agency, his spatial positioning-"standing at that threshold"-compensating for his status as an interstitial racialized other (Desai 2006, p. 57). By creating a new subjectivity position, Biju's racial and ethnic position can be understood as "affective difference", which Munoz defines as "ways in which various historically coherent groups 'feel' differently and deal with the world on a different emotional register" (2000, p. 70). What is really interesting here is that Biju's minority statement is against the Anglicized Indian women, who are seen as insipid representatives of middle-class migrants conforming to white normativity. His resorting to the native tongue in his song is an act of resistance that undermines the Indian women's aping of Westernized urban culture while rejecting their own.
The restaurants that Biju works in-Baby Bistro, Le Colonial and the Stars and Stripes Diner-all bear witness to the neo-colonial city as a key site that recalls the colonial practice of exploitation. The glamor and glitz of the fancy restaurants camouflage their underbelly of grit and grime where the illegal immigrants strife to survive. Biju is no exception; he finds it difficult to accomodate to this hidden, underground world: "There was a whole world in the basement kitchens of New done a single harmful thing to India" (Desai 2006, p. 86). Biju's inherited hatred for other minorities along with an inferiority complex makes him passively succumb to exploitation and discrimination. Unlike Jemubhai though, Biju is never really torn between his native and Americanized identity; for him, the alien culture remains a mere imposition on his subversive identity and he knows, if need be, how to turn vulnerability into a condescending acceptance of reality. Even as he quips, "I'm civilized, sir, ready for the U.S., I'm civilized, mam" at the U.S. embassy, he vicariously lives the life of the "legalized foreigners" whose "expandable third-world suitcase[s]" he envies (Desai 2006, p. 201). Our final and lasting impression of Biju is a solitary vision: stripped of all clothing and luggage, he comes back to India, ludicrous in his nightgown "with large, faded pink flowers and yellow, puffy sleeves, ruffles at the neck and hem" (Desai 2006, p. 349). In the final scene Biju embraces his father as he severs his ties with his foreign sojourn and wholeheartedly accepts his roots. Any attempt at interpellation that fixes the identity of the colonized in relation to the imperial gaze by objectifying it and rendering it powerless ultimately fails in the case of Biju (Ashcroft 2007, p. 207). Desai's ending celebrates hope in what Jose Munoz describes as "counterpublics," "communities and relational chains of resistance (read unity) that contest the dominant public sphere" (1999, p. 9). Biju, by embracing his culture, moves on to create and celebrate a home-coming that speaks of a different world-building and points towards a new and more affirmative subjectivity.
By tracking the trauma of diasporic displacement and its aftermath, this paper has argued that both Jemubhai and Biju, consciously and unconsciously, fall prey to colonial power play encapsulated in the memory of urban space. They are both affected by an inheritance of loss and trauma, which neither of them can escape. Jemubhai's sojourn in Cambridge makes him a disgruntled figure pathetic in his endeavors to "become white." His rigidity, however, destroys any possibility to reconfigure himself even when he comes back to India and retires in Kalimpong. He is unable to navigate along Munozian disidentificatory lines to inhabit a new subject position. Biju, on the other hand, engages with a cultural and political process in New York that fosters change. Even as he accommodates to capitalist culture in the global city, Biju's specific engagements challenge the power politics inherent in neo-colonial city life. He relies on a strategy akin to Munozian disidentification to create a processual discourse, an "identity-in-difference," and becomes a potential border-crosser and shapeshifter, whose final statement celebrates a new twist in subjectivity. By bringing postcolonial literature to bear on affect studies, my paper has opened up opportunities to both critique the partisan politics of Eurocentric affect studies and to increase possible methodologies for understanding what affect theory entails. Also, where postcolonial literary studies have adhered to "negative" affects, such as trauma and shame, my article, often admitting the former, has introduced generative frameworks in which postcolonial (migrant) subjects survive and defy negative feelings of subjugation to imagine new subjectivities, turning the psychological trauma of colonial subjugation "into the resource…of a collective liberation" (Khanna 2020, p. 3).
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