How does an immigrant become an ethnic American? And does American society fundamentally alter because of these newcomers?

In Ethnic Routes to Becoming American, Sharmila Rudrappa examines the paths South Asian immigrants in Chicago take toward assimilation in the late twentieth-century United States, where deliberations on citizenship rights are replete with the politics of recognition. She takes us inside two ethnic institutions, a battered women’s shelter, Apna Ghar, and a cultural organization, the Indo American Center, to show how immigrant activism, which brings cultural difference into public sphere debates, ironically abets these immigrants’ assimilation. She interlaces ethnographic details with political-philosophical debates on the politics of recognition and redistribution. In this study on the under-researched topic of the incorporation of South Asian immigrants into the American polity, Sharmila Rudrappa compels us to rethink ethnic activism, participatory democracy, and nation-building processes.

Sharmila Rudrappa is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas, Austin, where she is affiliated with the Center for Asian American Studies.

The disemboweled state continues to wield enormous power over the way immigrants forge their social lives in the US. Sharmila Rudrappa's Ethnic Routes provides a road-map of both the interventionist state and shows us how "assimilation" is a harmful weapon used against immigrants, who, in turn, use the idea against ourselves to distance our world from that of the unassimilated contradictions of US life.

An exciting, provocative book . . . brilliantly dissects some of the fascinating paradoxes of contemporary multiculturalism.