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영어

The paper attempts a close reading of two short stories “Alphabet Soup” and “Apple Pie One by Two” from Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet. It examines the short stories as narratives that successfully represent various impacts of current century’s transnational movements on heterogenous diasporic Indians. By focusing on the Indian city of Bangalore in the depicted transnational movements, Sankaran succeeds in presenting new light on continuously changing natures of transnational movements of the new century. The Bangalore city, known as India’ silicon valley, experienced and explored by returnees from America defies any easy description. For Indian Americans, the return visit to Bangalore forces a complete reconstruction of Asian American identity. To high-skilled professional migrants, Bangalore provides unprecedented chances, allowing them to have transnational connections while staying in India. However, the characters’ individual choices and preferences are also governed by national policies of both India and America and also by the flow of global capitalism. Sankaran succeeds in presenting the very heterogeneous nature of such transnational movements between America and India and carefully represents how each character’s identity is constantly re-negotiated in the process.