Roots in the Concrete and the Soil: Spatial Geographies, Cultural Resilience, and the Transnational Bildungsroman in Oleander Girl

Author(s)	Dr. H. MOHAMMED AZARUDEEN
Country	India
Abstract	Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Oleander Girl (2013) follows Korobi Roy from the ancestral certainties of a Kolkata mansion to the disorienting geography of post-9/11 America, where she searches for the African American father her family's silence had erased. This essay argues that Divakaruni uses two contrasting spatial registers—the ancestral “soil” of 26 Tarak Prasad Roy Road and the alienating “concrete” of New York and California—to stage a transnational bildungsroman in which maturity is not assimilation into either world but a synthesis of both.
Keywords	diaspora; transnational bildungsroman; spatial theory; post-9/11 racial profiling; hybridity; third space; cultural resilience
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-08-10
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.84974

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