Essay On American Dreamer

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Change catalyzes development. In nature, if species do not mature, life ceases. The same concept applies to culture. Cultural stagnation yields a dying culture, but cultural conflict incites transformation. In Bharati Mukherjee’s “American Dreamer,” Mukherjee analyzes cultural conflict through her experience emigrating from Calcutta to North America. She describes individual and holistic responses and reactions to immigration that she discovers among several levels of society; today, millions of refugees migrate to democratic nations in pursuit of unalienable rights that their homelands deprive them. Immigrants usher unique cultures into the nation they reside. Cultural conflict fruits both positive and negative changes in character. Cultural conflict promotes identity transformation.
An introduction of foreign cultures polarizes a national persona. Excluding minority races from the national identity …show more content…

Insular people groups react to changes in their communal identity by combating the sources of new cultures. Mukherjee (1997) cites the Immigration and Naturalization Service opening an enforcement office in Iowa as a severe response to a flood of immigrant refugees (para. 5). Such cultural conflict in a community prevents cultural blending, dividing neighbors based on race, religion, and tradition. Guilt for balkanization lies not only on the community’s natives but also on the community’s immigrants. Mukherjee (1997) spotlights self-balkanization of emigrants from her native India; “Some first-generation Indo-Americans, embittered by racism and by unofficial ‘glass ceilings,’ construct a phantom identity, more-Indian-than-Indians-in-India, as a defense against marginalization” (para. 29). Such extreme rejection of the community culture in which they reside prevents optimal assimilation. Communities’ addition of cultural balkanization to their identity handicaps symbiotic

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