Cultural Identity By Stuart Hall

This research study focuses at negotiating the shifting identities of immigrants and their traumas in postcolonial literature with reference to Lahiri’s fiction. The suffering of every immigrant in achieving a shelter and identity in a foreign land often leads to loss of identity. The qualms, agitation and nervousness of immigrants often increase the issues of identity, and immigrants often feel alienated in the midst of exotic land, they even start to think about achieving new identities. Stuart Hall (1987) a famous cultural theorist discusses the issues of cultural identity and migration as he says “Migration is a one way trip. There is no “home” to go back to”. Change in the place and ambience totally change the circumstances in the lives of immigrants in Lahiri’s fiction, they often try to cling to their own cultural identity and costumes. But the cultural effect is often so strong that it deeply affects the identity of immigrants and they ultimately try to change their identities. Immigrants make an absurd attempt to get mingled in the culture of foreign country. Hall discusses “Cultural identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (235).

The first way describes cultural identity as a shared culture by many people; a culture is like a collective self. As he further argues that cultural identities always highlight the same practices of past which give people stability, unshifting and constant frames of reference and meaning beneath the shifting divisions and shifting in their actual history (6). Hall shares his personal experience of immigration in Minimal Selves (1987) that when he thinks about identity, he got to know that he has always felt that he is a migrant amongst the foreigners. Similarly Lahiri’s fiction is autobiographical she explains her sorrows as a migrant and suffering in a foreign