...Vanita Reddy Abstract This essay examines Indian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri's literary engagements with cosmopolitan Indian beauty and style in her short stories “Sexy” and “Interpreter of Maladies” (2003). It situates these engagements as part of a transnational beauty assemblage...

... and to remedy-or at least mediatethe perceived shortcomings ofidentity politics and its analog ofintersectionality, particularly as it has been articulated by legal scholars. A third essay that explores affective perspectives is "Jhumpi Lahiri's Feminist Cosmopolitics and the Transnational Beauty Assemblage...

... the Tebhaga peasant struggles of Bengal between 1946 and 1948 described, colonial rule at it its inception yoked these systems of violence against peasant women to its own reproduction at the global level (Chakravartty 1980 ; Lahiri 2001 ; Sen 2001 ). Peasant women in Bengal in the Tebhaga movement fought...

... protagonist’s beauty in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (1989); this is a physical attractiveness that repeatedly reveals both the potential and the failures of national and transnational belonging for diasporic Indian women. Chapter 2 shifts the focus to Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of short stories...