“The Final Continent”: Geographies of Emotions and Emotional Geographies in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Short Fiction

According to Davidson et al. (2007) emotional geography has “a common concern with the spatiality and temporality of emotions, with the way they coalesce around and within certain places.” A study of literary representations of the spatiality of emotions may be especially suitable for unraveling the complex emotional relations between people and environments, and may lead to a better understanding of geographies of emotions and emotional geographies, the ways feelings generate and mediate our behaviors in and attitudes to places and spaces through embodies and lived experience, and emotional associations. The paper maps the location and formation of emotions in people, places, and atmospheres, investigating the interconnections between individuals’ sense of place, remembering through place, and affective relationships in a selection of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories. My analysis primarily focuses on the development of emotional attachment and a concomitant sense of belonging and self in the characters, as well as of their evolving affective relationships with people and (remembered) places, and argues that the two processes intertwine, are mutually constructive and constantly changing, since emotions are fundamentally “relational flows, fluxes or currents, inbetween people and places” (Davidson et al, 2007).