Sharma's Family Life provides a pertinent example of immigration and narration, accommodating both immigration genre and generic immigration. I argue that the domestic and the ethnic are textually recuperated within an artistic gesture that answers Henry Lefebvre's appeal: "Let everyday life become a work of art" (Everyday Life 204). I propose to study the intersection between three pivotal issues in the narrative: immigration, everyday life and artistic production. Ajay, the narrator, has to elbow his way alone in a hostile environment and to negotiate his daily life as an immigrant child. The accident causes the collapse of the family with the mother now taking care only of the invalid son and the father sinking into alcoholism. He hits his head on the bottom of the pool he remains unconscious three minutes under water which has irreversibly damaged his brain. Birju, the elder son, has an accident in the swimming pool.
The Mishras' immigration to the US soon morphs into a tragic nightmare.
It took Sharma almost thirteen years to render a fictional account based on the story of his own family. This essay addresses Akhil Sharma's novel Family Life (2014).
Underlying this project is a curiosity about what happens when literature acts like ethnography, or is mistaken for ethnography, or when ethnography acts like literature. Ways of Knowing Small Places brings to critical attention two bodies of writing: fiction conceived as a critique of/an alternative to ethnography and fiction by anthropologists. Meanwhile, many anthropologists resorted to more self-reflexive modes of writing, such as autobiography and fiction. In the 1960s, however, the natives of those small places usurped the right to represent themselves in social science and the literary marketplace. Small, isolated places – particularly islands – had been key sites for studying non-western peoples through participant observation. Confronted by unprecedented social, economic, and epistemological change initiated by decolonization and the Civil Rights movement, American ethnographers and minority writers of fiction had to rethink their relation to the small places and cultures that had hitherto been central to their writing.
Ways of Knowing Small Places analyzes several responses to a crisis in American ethnographic and literary representation that began roughly in the 1960s.
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