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2 books match the query 'Bhalla, Tamara'

cover of Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community

Reading Together, Reading Apart

Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community

Tamara Bhalla

University of Illinois Press, 2016

Often thought of as a solitary activity, the practice of reading can in fact encode the complex politics of community formation. Engagement with literary culture represents a particularly integral facet of identity formation--and expresses of a sense of belonging--within the South Asian diaspora in the United States.
 
Tamara Bhalla blends a case study with literary and textual analysis to illuminate this phenomenon. Her fascinating investigation considers institutions from literary reviews to the marketplace to social media and other technologies, as well as traditional forms of literary discussion like book clubs and academic criticism. Throughout, Bhalla questions how her subjects' circumstances, desires, and shared race and class, limit the values they ascribe to reading. She also examines how ideology circulating around a body of literature or a self-selected, imagined community of readers shapes reading itself and influences South Asians' powerful, if contradictory, relationship with ideals of cultural authenticity.
 
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cover of The Social Life of Reading: Race, Book Clubs, and Post-Digital Readership in America

The Social Life of Reading

Race, Book Clubs, and Post-Digital Readership in America

Tamara Bhalla

University of Massachusetts Press, 2027

Showing how what we read, and with whom, reveals how power works in America

In an interview about his novel The Emperor of Gladness being selected for Oprah’s Book Club, Ocean Vuong recalled the women in his mother’s nail salon—working-class immigrants, mostly single mothers—who would buy whatever book Oprah had chosen. What she gave them, Vuong reflected, was “access… a ticket into the discourse.” Books, he said, “can change the posture of somebody’s mother.” It’s a small observation, but it points to something Tamara Bhalla takes seriously in The Social Life of Reading: that how we read, what we read, and with whom we read is rarely just a matter of personal taste.

Bhalla reveals how social reading practices, from celebrity book selections to Goodreads reviews, are crucial arenas where power circulates, gets contested, and gets remade in contemporary American culture. Drawing on sociology of literature, ethnic studies, and feminist cultural analysis, she shows that reading, often framed as apolitical and personal, is fundamentally a political practice. Using the term “post-digital” to capture how 21st-century reading blends digital platforms with in-person gatherings and print, Bhalla traces two distinct reading cultures: mainstream communities, including celebrity book clubs, Goodreads, and Moms for Liberty, that center white, heteronormative values through affective, particularly maternal, responses to literature; and reading communities informed by digital Black feminism and traditions of self-definition, conscious consumption, and political engagement to imagine alternative literary futures.

The result is a striking portrait of contemporary reading culture as simultaneously structured by whiteness and shaped by the emergence of racially conscious alternatives. Bhalla demonstrates that what we read, with whom we read, and what we value in literature is not a matter of individual taste—it is a powerful cultural force shaping who gets represented, whose voices matter, and what stories get told.

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