India abroad : diasporic cultures of postwar America and England / Sandhya Rajendra Shukla.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shukla, Sandhya Rajendra, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

East Indians--Foreign countries.

East Indians.

East Indians--England.

East Indians--United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (336 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey ; Oxford, England : Princeton University Press, [2003]

Summary:

India Abroad analyzes the development of Indian diasporas in the United States and England from 1947, the year of Indian independence, to the present. Across different spheres of culture--festivals, entrepreneurial enclaves, fiction, autobiography, newspapers, music, and film--migrants have created India as a way to negotiate life in the multicultural United States and Britain. Sandhya Shukla considers how Indian diaspora has become a contact zone for various formations of identity and discourses of nation. She suggests that carefully reading the production of a diasporic sensibility, one that is not simply an outgrowth of the nation-state, helps us to conceive of multiple imaginaries, of America, England, and India, as articulated to one another. Both the connections and disconnections among peoples who see themselves as in some way Indian are brought into sharp focus by this comparativist approach. This book provides a unique combination of rich ethnographic work and textual readings to illuminate the theoretical concerns central to the growing fields of diaspora studies and transnational cultural studies. Shukla argues that the multi-sitedness of diaspora compels a rethinking of time and space in anthropology, as well as in other disciplines. Necessarily, the standpoint of global belonging and citizenship makes the boundaries of the "America" in American studies a good deal more porous. And in dialogue with South Asian studies and Asian American studies, this book situates postcolonial Indian subjectivity within migrants' transnational recastings of the meanings of race and ethnicity. Interweaving conceptual and material understandings of diaspora, India Abroad finds that in constructed Indias, we can see the contradictions of identity and nation that are central to the globalized condition in which all peoples, displaced and otherwise, live.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION Geographies of Indianness

ONE Histories and Nations

TWO Little Indias, Places for Indian Diasporas

THREE Affiliations and Ascendancy of Diasporic Literature

FOUR India in Print, India Abroad

FIVE Generations of Indian Diaspora

EPILOGUE Presents and Futures

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780691227610

0691227616

OCLC:

1273306753