REVIEWS | EXCERPT | CONTENTS | AUTHOR BIO | SUBJECT CATEGORIES
The first comprehensive study of the peripheral position and invisibility of South Asian perspectives within Asian America
A Part, Yet Apart
South Asians in Asian America
Search the full text of this book
edited by Lavina Dhingra Shankar and Rajini Srikanth
"...provides an excellent introduction to Asian American studies. ... Offering different histories and deploying various analytics, the book entextualizes a community of debate and critique. These productive tensions supplement the richness of the volume's material, making A Part, Yet Apart a significant contribution."
—The Journal of Asian Studies
As people from the cultures of the Indian subcontinent increasingly participate in the complex and often heated debates about race and ethnicity in the United States, they confront questions about naming and claiming an identity that designates their group in this country. To be sure, claiming any single identity omits, perhaps threatens to obliterate, the significant political, historical, economic, and religious differences between their countries of origin. However, the term "South Asian" is growing in acceptance among people in this country who trace their heritage to India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Maldives because it acknowledges common interests while it allows for difference.
This construction process parallels the gradual acceptance of the term "Asian American" by peoples primarily of East and Southeast Asian ancestry who found abundant reason to claim a shared identity in dealing with officialdom and an apparently intractable racism in this country. In time, "Asian American" has become a designation of collective pride for a wide range of peoples. In academic institutions and society generally, there are vexed questions about the term's inclusiveness and the dominance of established groups over more recent ones.
A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America concerns itself with the extent to which South Asian Americans are and ought to be included within Asian America – as that term is applied to academic programs and admission policies; grassroots community organizing and politics more broadly; and critical analyses of cultural products. Taken together these essays form a spirited dialogue on the dilemmas of identity politics, coalition building, and diasporics.
Excerpt
Read an excerpt from Chapter 1 (pdf).
Reviews
"Given that the dazzling variety of subject positions and intersectionalities constitute a riddle that cannot be solved, this volume drives home the point that since we must continue puzzling, we might as well do it together on all fronts."
—Buchbesprechungen
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword: South Asian Identity in America – Rajiv Shankar
Introduction: Challenging the Imperatives of South Asian American and Asian American Studies – Lavina Dhingra Shankar and Rajini Srikanth
Part I: Names and Labels
1. With Kaleidoscope Eyes: The (Potential) Dangers of Indentarian Coalitions – Deepika Bahri
2. Risking (Self) Naming: (South) Asian "Partitions" in the American Academy? – Lavina Dhingra Shankar
Part II: The (Dis)Connections of Race
3. Not Asian, White, or Black: Reflections on South Asian American Racial Identity – Nazli Kibria
4. Pahkar Singh's Argument with America: Color and the Structure of Race Formation – Min Song
Part III: Topologies of Activism
5. Crafting Solidarities – Vijay Prashad
6. At the Crossroads: College Activism and Its Impact on Identity Formation – Anu Gupta
7. From Campus to Community Politics: Perspectives in Organizing and Coalition Building in the Asian American Community – Sumantra Tito Sinha
8. The Call of Rice: The Queer South Asian American Community and the Queer Asian-American Community – Sandip Roy
9. Ram Yoshino Uppuluri's Campaign: The Implications for Panethnicity in Asian America – Rajini Srikanth
Part IV: Literary Texts and Diasporics
10. Reading of South Asian American Literature – Ruth Yu Hsiao
11. South Asian Americans and Diaspora – Samir Dayal
Contributors
In the Series
About the Author(s)
Lavina Dhingra Shankar is Assistant Professor of English at Bates College, Maine.
 | Rajini Srikanth is Adjunct Professor of American Studies at Tufts University, Massachusetts. |
Subject Categories
Asian American Studies
Race and Ethnicity
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.