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A Transnational Reading of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices

This paper aims at a transnational reading of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, one of the highly acclaimed South Asian American novels. Divakaruni examines the transnationality of America by analyzing how America as a nation-state exerts its transnational force by propagating American culture and ideology, ‘American Dream,’ all over the world and by causing Asian people to aspire to immigrate to the U.S. The author's attention is paid to search for the way immigrants are able to survive against the transnational force of America. She suggests an ancient Indian belief on the healing power of spices as a survival strategy which relieves the distressed lives of South Asian immigrants dominated by male-centered immigrant community as well as the racialization of the whole American society. That is, Divakaruni maintains a significant bonding with the cultural or spiritual heritage of her home country through transnational imagination. The author also creates a transnational women’s place by revising a traditional Indian epic narrative from women-centered point of view and putting an emphasis on the importance of transnational female solidarity as a resistance against the atriarchal ideology of Indian-American immigrant community. Thus, transnational discourse can be regarded as the useful approach which suggests a new understanding of Asian-American immigrant novels in that it provides not only a critical paradigm for approaching American society but examines immigrants’ resistant practices against the racialization of American society.