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Intense and sometimes contentious debates about South Asian identity
Between the Lines
South Asians and Postcoloniality
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edited by Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva
This ground-breaking collection of new interviews, critical essays, and commentary explores South Asian identity and culture. Sensitive to the false homogeneity implied by "South Asian," "diaspora," "postcolonial," and "Asian American," the contributors attempt to unpack these terms. By examining the social, economic, and historical particularities of people who live "between the lines"—on and between borders—they reinstate questions of power and privilege, agency and resistance. As South Asians living in the United States and Canada, each to some degree must reflect on the interaction of the personal "I," the collective "we," and the world beyond.
The South Asian scholars gathered together in this volume speak from a variety of theoretical perspectives; in the essays and interviews that cross the boundaries of conventional academic disciplines, they engage in intense, sometimes contentious, debate.
Excerpt
Read an excerpt from the Introduction (pdf).
Reviews
"an important and valuable study as it engages in a discourse which pushes beyond simplistic meanings and complacent acceptance of complex terms like 'postcolonial' and 'South Asian.'"
—MELUS
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction – Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva
Part I: Interviews
2. Observing Ourselves among Others, Interview with Meena Alexander – Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva
3. Pedagogical Alternatives: Issues in Postcolonial Studies, Interview with Gauri Viswanathan – Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva
4. Transnationality and Multiculturalist Ideology, Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva
Part II: Commentaries
5. African-Americans and the New Immigrants – Amritjit Singh
6. Life at the Margins: In the Thick of Multiplicity – M.G. Vassanji
7. Mullahs, Sex, and Bureaucrats: Pakistan's Confrontations with the Modern World – Sohail Inayatullah
8. Coming to Terms with the "Postcolonial" – Deepika Bahri
Part III: Studies in the Media and Popular Culture
9. An Explosion of Difference: The Margins of Perception in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid – Ranita Chatterjee
10. Emigrants Twice Displaced: Race, Color, and Identity in Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala – Binita Mehta
11. From Ritual Drama to National Prime Time: Mahabharata, India's Televisual Obsession – Sanjoy Majumder
12. Television, Politics, and the Epic Heroine: Case Study, Sita – Mahasveta Barua
Part IV: Literary Criticism
13. Replacing the Colonial Gaze: Gender as Strategy in Salman Rushdie's Fiction – Sukeshi Kamra
14. Style Is (Not) the Woman: Sara Suleri's Meatless Days – Samir Dayal
15. Redefining the Postcolonial Female Self: Women in Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day – Pushpa Naidu Parekh
16. "Luminous Brahmin Children Must Be Saved": Imperialist Ideologies, "Postcolonial" Histories in Bharati Mukherjee's The Tiger's Daughter – Indrani Mitra
17. The Troubled Past: Literature of Severing the Viewer/Viewed Dialectic – Huma Ibrahim
Part V: Experimental Critiques
18. Jane Austin in Meerut, India – Amitava Kumar
19. Border Crossings: Retrieval and Erasure of the Self as Other – Shantanu DuttaAhmed
20. I see the Glass as Half Full – Uma Parameswaran
About the Contributors
About the Author(s)
Deepika Bahri is Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature and Theory at Emory University.
Mary Vasudeva is on the Board of Directors for the Academic Excellence Foundation at Bowling Green State University.
Contributors: Meena Alexander, Gauri Viswanathan, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Amritjit Singh, M. G. Vassanji, Sohail Inayatullah, Ranita Chatterjee, Benita Mehta, Sanjoy Majumder, Mahasveta Barua, Sukeshi Kamra, Samir Dayal, Pushpa Naidu Parekh, Indrani Mitra, Huma Ibrahim, Amitava Kumar, Shantanu DuttaAhmed, Uma Parameswaran.
Subject Categories
Asian American Studies
Race and Ethnicity
Asian Studies
In the series
Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Vő.
The "standard" written histories of Asian immigrants to the United States have been imbued with Western cultural biases. As a critique and corrective to earlier work, Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Vő, aims to develop a history of Asian Americans that is compatible with their own experience, that treats Asian Americans as agents of historical change and as creators of a new culture. In addition, this series intends to focus on the groups that are flourishing in the contemporary U.S.—Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese—about whom little has been written as well as to add to the substantial work done on the Chinese and Japanese in this country.