The Absent Family

Migrant Modernity and the Affective Cost of Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

This paper examines the trope of the absent family through the lens of affect theory to illuminate the emotional and psychological terrain of migrant modernity. Reading Sunetra Gupta’s The Glassblower’s Breath (1993) and So Good in Black (2009), alongside Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013), the study traces how transnational migration, so frequently framed in terms of opportunity, modernity, and cosmopolitan belonging, carries with it a quieter, more enduring cost. While migration may offer new beginnings, it also creates deep ruptures in intimate ties and leaves behind an emotional residue that is not easily resolved. Drawing on affect theory, particularly Sara Ahmed’s work, the paper reconceives familial absence not just as physical separation, but as a condition of affective disorientation where closeness and intimacy take the shape of memory, silence, or withdrawal. These texts show how diasporic subjects carry the weight of emotional absences that shape their identity through what remains unspoken and unresolved. Rather than offering narratives of return or reconciliation, Gupta and Lahiri present diasporic narratives as marked not only by hybridity and movement, but also by the ache of what is no longer within reach. In doing so, their works call attention to the affective underside of cosmopolitanism, urging one to think: what is the hidden cost of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once?