I see myself as an American writer in the tradition of other American writers whose parents and grandparents had passed through Ellis Island.
Mukherjee is one of a growing number of authors who resist efforts to push to the sidelines literature featuring the richness of immigrant and ethnic communities and who redefine through their works what it means to be American. Along with the Native Americans Paula Gunn Allen and Leslie Marmon Silko and the Chinese American Amy Tan, Mukherjee depicts a United States that can no longer imagine itself in monolithic terms, that "is about diversity, not uniformity," as Allen was quoted as saying in an article in the Chicago Tribune (17 March 1991). In the same article Mukherjee said that "The ethnic voices were always there, but there wasn't a recognition of a community of writers until the de-Europeanization of our country became physically evident in the mid-80s." Mukherjee's short stories reflect her growing interest in representing a more and more inclusive view of what it means to be American.
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