Aliens, Aliases, Surrogates and Familiars: The Family in Jhumpa Lahiri's Short Stories

In this essay, I argue that alienation and familiarity serve as mobile matrices for understanding the affectively experienced impact of transnational migration in certain of Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories. While we may think of alienation as a precondition of migrant identity, it is a condition that is familiar to most of us in different contexts. How does alienation, thus plurally conceived, figure in the experience of migrants, producing the relay between heimlich/unheimlich experiences? Moreover, in the socio-cultural context of globalisation, how does transnational migration challenge conventional notions of family, a word associated with notions of familiarity and filiation that are seemingly antonymous to the idea of alienation? These are the questions I set out to answer, concluding that the family' is always a unit composed by its very hauntings, surrogates, and absences.