This essay constitutes an attempt at reading Bharati Mukherjee’s 2011 novel, Miss New India, through the prism of spatial locations depicted in it. Unlike many of the texts in the late South Asian American author’s oeuvre, which depict migration from the East to the West, Miss New India is located exclusively within South Asia. This notwithstanding, the novel focuses on the impact the West used to and continues to exert on the East. I would like to argue that through her depictions of places and non-places of Bangalore-the novel’s primary location-Mukherjee points to the spatial interconnectedness of the East and the West as well as to the temporal interconnectedness of the colonial past and postcolonial, late-capitalist present.
This article constitutes an analysis of the depiction of houses in Jonathan Lethem's 2003 novel The Fortress of Solitude, universally labeled a novel of gentrification. It is my contention that despite being criticized for its alleged celebration of the process the text nevertheless paints a more nuanced picture of gentrification. It does so through the depiction of houses -t he titular brownstones of this essay -t hat function both as a synecdoche for a larger neighborhood or community that they are situated in and as a reflection of the dynamics of the family units that occupy them.
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