Spatial Displacement: Alienation and Unhomeliness in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

Abstract

Jumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) is a Novel offers a nuanced literary cartography of spatial displacement, mapping the psychological and existential fractures that emerge when immigrants are uprooted from their native geographies and thrust into unfamiliar cultural and landscapes. This paper examines how Lahiri constructs spatial displacement not merely as a physical relocation but as a condition of perpetual unhomeliness – the haunting inability to feel at home in any place, or within oneself. Drawing on Homibaba’s postcolonial concepts of the “unhomely” and the “third space”, the study traces how the Ganguli family – across two generations-inhabits an interstitial zone where neither India nor Americq offers complete belonging. The paper explores how alienation manifests differently along generational and gendered lines. The study argues that Lahiri presents spatial displacement as both a personal trauma and a socio-cultural condition of the South Asian diaspora in America, where in the immigrant body becomes a borderland –perpetually negotiating between origin and settlement, memory and assimilation. Ultimately,the novel gestures toward a fragile reconciliation through cultural hybridity, suggesting that unhomeliness, while painful, may become the very ground upon which new, hyphenated identities are forged.