Published Paper Details:

Bharati Mukherjee, a pioneering voice in the Asian American literary canon, is predominantly read through postcolonial and feminist frameworks that emphasize themes of cultural displacement, identity crisis, and gendered agency. While these readings are invaluable, this article argues for a re-interpretation of her major novels--Jasmine (1989), The Holder of the World (1993), and Desirable Daughters (2002)--through the emerging theoretical paradigm of critical posthumanism and new materialism. This lens shifts the focus from the psychological and cultural interiority of the immigrant subject to the dynamic, agential role of non-human forces (the body, technology, geography, objects) in co-constituting identity. It is contended that Mukherjee's protagonists do not merely adapt to a new culture; they undergo a radical, material metamorphosis facilitated by their entanglement with the American landscape, its technologies, and the visceral capacities of their own bodies. This reading moves beyond the dialectic of loss and assimilation to reveal a more complex, posthuman vision of becoming, where identity is a fluid assemblage rather than a stable essence, anticipating key concerns in 21st-century thought about mobility, materiality, and subjectivity.