Author: Sandhya Shukla
Publisher: Orient Longman
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 322
ISBN/UPC (if available): 978-81-250-2775-1
Description
India Abroad analyses 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 disclosures 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 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 globalised condition in which all peoples, displaced and otherwise, live.
REVIEWS
The most interesting work in immigration studies is being carried out on Asian American topics, and this exceptional book is an outstanding example. Theoretically sophisticated and yet nicely grounded in the materiality of migrant experience, it illuminates the tension between transnational identities and localized realities; I enjoyed reading it, learned a lot from it, and heartily recommend it.
-Matthew Frye Jacobson, Yale University
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
Acknowledgements
Index