SOURCE: "'We Murder Who We Were': Jasmine and the Violence of Identity," in American Literature, Vol. 66, No. 3, September, 1994, pp. 573-93.

In the following essay, Carter-Sanborn discusses the place of identity and violence in Mukherjee's Jasmine.

The narrator of Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine implicitly positions herself early in her own text in terms of narratives already abandoned. At age seven, Jyoti is the star pupil of Masterji, "the oldest and sourest teacher in our school": "I was whiz in Punjabi and Urdu, and the first likely female candidate for English instruction he'd ever had. He had a pile of English books, some from the British Council Library, some with USIS stickers…. The British books were thick, with more long words per page. I remember Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, both of which I was forced to abandon because they were too difficult." By thus locating her novel in the space...