Excerpt from a February 2017 article:
'I am American, not Asian-American.' Writer Bharati Mukherjee (1940-2017) never wanted a label:About the article source Scroll.in:
She did say “I am American, not Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally.” But her rejection of the hyphen was not a rejection of her roots at all. She loved going to Durga Puja celebrations.
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I recently wrote this brief (unpublished) commentary on "Third World" writers in their "First World spaces:"
Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated SpaceHere is an excerpt from Larry Auster's more extensive commentary from his article in Frontpage Magazine:
By: Arun Prabha Mukherjee
Although this collection of essays...demonstrate the topics that the majority of Third World writers and essayists broach. Mukherjee presents a harsh and racially negative view of the Euro-Canadian arts and literary world.
How Multiculturalism Took Over America from July 2004.
Moderate Myth [Number Five]: The Pro-Western Multiculturalist
Another soothing fiction that has helped advance multiculturalism is a personality type rather than an idea. It is the friendly Third-World immigrant, who warmly professes his or her love for America, yet who, on closer examination, reveals a desire to do away with America as an historically distinct country. Such a moderate is the novelist Bharati Mukherjee, an immigrant to the U.S. by way of Canada, who had this to say in a public television interview with Bill Moyers in 1990:
What I like to think, Bill, is that you and I are both now without rules, because of the large influx of non-Europeans in the '70s and '80s, and more to come in the '90s. That it's not a melting pot situation anymore, and I don't like to use the phrase melting pot if I can help it, because of the 19th century associations with mimicry; that one was expected to scrub down one's cultural eccentricities and remake oneself in the Anglo-Saxon image. If I can replace melting pot with a phrase like fusion vat, or fusion chamber, in which you and I are both changed radically by the presence of new immigrants, I would be much happier. So that you are having to change your rules, I like to think, and I am certainly have to change my Old World rules.… [Emphasis added].Underneath Mukherjee's confiding and civilized tone, she was informing her American audience that they must "mongrelize" themselves in order to accommodate non-Europeans. In this new dispensation (unchallenged by her supremely passive and "open" interviewer, Bill Moyers, who piously hung on her every word), the preservation of America as a historic nation and people was not even an issue any more. To grasp how unnatural this situation was, imagine an immigrant in some relatively sane country—say Japan or Italy or the pre-1965 America—who, shortly after his arrival, announces to his new countrymen: "Oh, by the way, you people must—in order to make me comfortable—give up everything that has constituted your culture and identity. But don't worry! You shouldn't see this as a loss!" He would be thrown out on his ear. Yet by the 1990s America had become the sort of decadent place where a smooth-talking "moderate" could make a career saying exactly that.
There are no comforts, no old mythologies to cling to. We have to invent new American mythologies. Letting go of the old notions of what America was shouldn't be seen as a loss.… I hope that as we all mongrelize, or as we all fuse, that we will build a better and more hopeful nation.(16)
Like most imperialists, Mukherjee seemed complacently oblivious to the culture and people she wished to dominate. At one point in the Moyers interview, she predicted an increase in ethnic violence, "because there's a kind of disinvestment in America.… [P]eople have not invested in the country. There's been a 'What part of the pie is for me?' kind of an attitude …" It didn't seem to occur to her that the disinvestment in America that she regretted may have had something to do with the devaluing of America's historic identity that she applauded. Indeed, if anyone was wondering, "what part of the pie is for me," it would seem to be Mukherjee herself and her fellow immigrants, whom she spoke of as "we, the new pioneers, who are thinking of America as still a frontier country."
I think that the original American pioneers had to have been in many ways, hustlers, and capable of a great deal of violence in order to wrest the country from the original inhabitants. And to make a new life, new country, for themselves. So that vigor of possessing the land, I like to think, my characters have.
16. 16. Bill Moyers interview with Bharati Mukherjee, PBS, 1990.
Full transcript of the interview is here
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Addendum
Grandparents Muharjee and her husband Clark Blaise (who is also an author)
Clark Blaise:
...has been married since 1963 to writer Bharati Mukherjee. They met as students at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and have two sons. In 1978, Blaise and Mukherjee moved to Toronto. However, Mukherjee felt excluded in Canada, attributing it to racism and publishing an essay in Saturday Night.In 1980, the couple decided to return to the United States, moving to San Francisco.
[Source: Wikipedia]
The perfect multicultural grandchild:
Mukherjee's son Bart Anand, of Indian and Canadian heritage, married Kim, who is half Irish and half German American and they have just adopted a baby girl from China. Says Mukherjee, "So it's a very poly-national American family that we represent. What I want to get across is that I hope this will be the way American society goes, that we are all going to be embracing so many different ethnic and racial groups within our families that this whole anxiety about ethnic origin - what does it mean to be a hyphenated American - I hope will disappear."
[Source: Little India Half And Half: Just how authentic an American are you?]
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