by anupama jain
Temple University Press, 2011
Paper: 978-1-4399-0303-2 | eISBN: 978-1-4399-0304-9 | Cloth: 978-1-4399-0302-5
Library of Congress Classification E184.S69J35 2011
Dewey Decimal Classification 973.04914

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ABOUT THIS BOOK

Providing a useful analysis of and framework for understanding immigration and assimilation narratives, anupama jain's How to Be South Asian in America considers the myth of the American Dream in fiction (Meena Alexander's Manhattan Music), film (American Desi, American Chai), and personal testimonies. By interrogating familiar American stories in the context of more supposedly exotic narratives, jain illuminates complexities of belonging that also reveal South Asians' anxieties about belonging, (trans)nationalism, and processes of cultural interpenetration.

jain argues that these stories transform as well as reflect cultural processes, and she shows just how aspects of identity—gender, sexual, class, ethnic, national—are shaped by South Asians' accommodation of and resistance to mainstream American culture.