Overall, in depicting the immigrant woman's negotiations with the New World, Bharati Mukherjee's treatment of past spacetime becomes crucial. Usually, his novels portray past spacetime as a circumscribed space from which it is necessary to escape in order to (re)construct identity. For example, in Wife, Mukherjee depicts Dimple's inability to escape the past as an inability to transform into an American individual who has the power to define herself. In Jasmine, however, the protagonist almost completely rejects her past and her Indianness to facilitate her transformation and assimilation into America. Both novels depict the past as a restrictive spacetime. However, in Desirable Daughters, instead of describing the past as a fixed and essentialist entity that hinders the transformation of identity, Mukherjee highlights the active participation of past spacetime in the (re)definition of identity. Mukheree's new artistic vision parallels Homi Bhabha's theory of performative space, whose dynamism challenges pedagogical fixity and contributes to the continuous (re)structuring of both individual identities and nation-spaces. Meanwhile, Mukherjee's new treatment of past spacetime resolves some of the dialectical strands of his artistic vision. To outline the dissolution of these dialectics, this article traces Mukherjee's representation of past spacetime, first as an essentialist entity, then as a fluid metaphor, and finally as an ambivalent entity that helps the protagonist redefine her identity. In this way, critics who dismiss Mukherjee's novels as having an orientalist outlook might be made to reconsider his aesthetics as well as his novels. Keywords: Bharati Mukherjee, Desirable Daughters, identity, Orient...... center of paper... ....an: Immigrant consciousness in Jasmine.” Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Emanuele Nelson. New York: Garland, 1993. 181-96.Mason, Deborah. "The intercultural wars". New York Times Book Review. 28 April 2002. Vol 151 Edition 52102.11.Mukherjee, Bharati. “Beyond Multiculturalism: Surviving the 1990s.” Journal of Modern Literature 20.1 (1996): 29-34.--. Desirable daughters. New York: Theia, 2002.---. "A four hundred year old woman." The writer on her work: new essays in new territory. Ed. Janet Sternburg. New York: Norton, 1991. 33-8.--. Jasmine. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1989.--. Wife. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1975. Piper, Karen. “Post-Colonialism in the United States: Diversity or Hybridity?” Postcolonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon. Ed. Debora Madsen. London: Pluto, 1999. 14-29.Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.