SOURCE: “From Expatriation to Immigration: The Case of Bharati Mukherjee,” in The Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee: A Critical Symposium, Prestige Books, 1996, pp. 105-15.

In the following essay, Rao discusses eight stories from Mukherjee's Darkness and The Middleman and Other Stories and shows why in Mukherjee's own view they represent her desire to be thought of as a mainstream American author.

I

The point of departure for my paper is Elaine H. Kim's definition of Asian American Literature as the “Literature written in English, during the last hundred years by Chinese, Filipino, Japanese and Korean American writers concerning their identity and experience in the United States. … Although Asian Indian labour was recruited in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, their population in the United States remained small until recent years, and many of the published Asian Indian creative writings in English focus on India.”¹ My paper argues that...