Transnational Spaces and the Reimagining of Home in Kiran Desai's Fiction

<p><span>The present paper examines the trans and unstable meaning of home in the neo-diasporic literature by Kiran Desai, with the consideration of her two novels The Inheritance of Loss and Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. Surveying the current age of migration, displacement and cultural hybridity, the characters in Desai live in a place of conflict, which is both the place of memory and place as transformed by the flows of nations. The argument developed in the paper is that Desai does not conceive home as the stable and territorial space but rather psychological and emotional condition, which happens to be in the in-between or the third space discussed by the same postcolonial theorists. In an in-depth literary interpretation with critical-theoretical backing, the paper unveils how fiction by Desai defies ordinary dualities of homeland-hostland, belonging-estrangement, presence-absence in materiality and emotionality. Even though her perception of home materializes into transnational identities and postcolonial anxieties, it underlines the notion that in the neo-diasporic imagination, home is not based on geography but rather on fractured memory, cultural conflict and emotional survival.</span></p>