Living through Precarity: A Butlerian Study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland

Abstract

This article aims to explore Judith Butler’s concept of precarity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland. The questions this study seeks to find answers to are: What are the various manifestations of Butler’s notion of precarity in The Lowland? And to what extent does the Butlerian sense of agency allow the main characters of The Lowland the possibility of overcoming precarity? This research shows how enforced dispossession, which is a product of globally-imposed precarity, incites violence and leads to the involuntary migration of the subjects. In addition, it is revealed that precarity plays a segregative role in escalating religious and tribal conflicts in the post-Partition India. More importantly, in the final analysis, this study suggests that Butler’s reiterative sense of agency fails to account for the normative dynamics of precarity which is at work in the diasporic context of The Lowland.

Keywords

• precarity
• dispossession
• reiterative agency
• judith butler
• jhumpa lahiri
• the lowland