The Diasporic Experience in Mira Jacob’s The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing: Assimilation, Memory, and Mourning

Abstract

This research article explores the politics of cultural assimilation in Mira Jacob’s novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (2013). The aim is also to discuss the intersection of memory, trauma, and mourning concerning the immigrant experience. In terms of cultural assimilation, Barkan's six-stage model is critiqued, and diasporic ‘hybridity’ is proposed as an alternative to the notion of total assimilation. In the analysis of traumatic experience, the paper refers to Caruth’s formulations of the ‘abreactive model’. The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (2013) is a transcultural text that represents the gap that exists between first-generation Indian immigrants and their offspring. It is selected for analysis because it is a typical trauma novel featuring timeless and unspeakable experiences. The novel does not present a postcolonial collective trauma but an example of diasporic imagined trauma. By introducing two contrasting generations in her novel, Mira Jacob attempts to highlight the cultural dilemmas that baffle diasporas in the United States particularly those that resist assimilation. The textual analysis reveals that much of the narrative projects the haunting presence of home and the anguish of personal loss experienced by first-generation immigrants. Moreover, the novel questions the nostalgic and romantic engagements with the past, and it rather promotes a bold affirmation of the culture of the adopted land. In other words, Mira Jacob calls for more genuine engagements with the new culture that the second and third-generation immigrants are more exposed to than their home culture because their in-between status leaves them with no choice. Keywords: Assimilation, Memory, Identity, Trauma, Diasporic Experience.