"Winterscape" and "Diamond Dust"

Paper Summary:

This paper analyzes the two short stories by Anita Desai, "Winterscape" and "Diamond Dust". The paper examines how in "Winterscape", the oriental culture starts to create a space in an occidental society. It also looks at how in "Diamond Dust" even inside a non-dominant culture, there are ideologies that are also claiming a space of containment. The paper discusses how in both short stories, characters and situations acquire a symbolic meaning and thus they are capable of being associated to phenomena specific of different cultures or of major spheres, such as the Eastern/Western opposition.

From the Paper:

"In the process of creation of a certain cultural identity, heterogeneity tends to be replaced by homogeneity. In this way, the image that such identity projects in other cultures is an homogenous and identifiable whole. Western culture has built an stereotyped image of India. We can find an instance of this in Beth and her prejudice against the Hindu sisters in Winterscape. Anita Desai seeks to deconstruct the Hindu cultural identity stereotype that has been built by Western societies. From the localized way of thinking of post modernity, she presents the spatial configuration of India as a conflict between opposing forces. In Diamond Dust, she wants to show that in India the past and the present, the wild and the civilized world are living together."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994
• Desai, Anita. Diamond Dust. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000
• Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Massachusetts:Blackwell Ltd., 1996

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• Term Paper # 149860 : "Porter's National Diamond - Australian Wine Industry"

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