Digital Memory and Virtual Homelands: Technology-Mediated Cultural Transmission in Jhumpa Lahiri's Contemporary Works

Abstract

This study investigates the reconstitution of cultural transmission in Jhumpa Lahiri’s post-2010 fiction through the lens of digital memory. Focusing on The Lowland, Whereabouts, and selected narratives from Unaccustomed Earth, it articulates how virtual networks, social media, and digital communication reforge attachments to the ancestral homeland even as they decouple memory from material and collective sites. Mobilizing digital diaspora theory, cultural evolution models of digital mediation, and virtual ethnographic practices, the study traces how Lahiri’s protagonists move through the tension between embodied displacement and virtual re-embedding, producing what it names “virtual homelands”—spaces mediated by technology in which cultural identity is affirmed yet pliable. The reconstruction of memory in these texts reveals that digital connectivity magnifies transnational immediacy while engendering anxieties about the integrity and longevity of memory traditions across generations. The analysis thus contributes to the scholarship on technology and migratory cultures while advancing digital humanities as a necessary apparatus for interrogating twenty-first-century diaspora fiction.