What does it mean to belong? How are twenty-first-century diasporic subjects fashioning identities and communities that bind them together? Aspiring to Home examines these questions with a focus on immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Advancing a theory of locality to explain the means through which immigrants of varying regional, religious, and linguistic backgrounds experience what it means to belong, Bakirathi Mani shows how ethnicity is produced through the relationship between domestic racial formations and global movements of class and capital. Aspiring to Home focuses on popular cultural works created by first- and second-generation South Asians from 1999–2009, including those by author Jhumpa Lahiri and filmmaker Mira Nair, as well as public events such as the Miss India U.S.A. pageant and the Broadway musical Bombay Dreams. Analyzing these diverse productions through an interdisciplinary framework, Mani weaves literary readings with ethnography to unravel the constraints of form and genre that shape how we read diasporic popular culture.

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.

Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for History A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A Saveur “Essential Food Books That Define New York City” Selection In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women. As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.

Extending the understanding of race and ethnicity in the South beyond the prism of black-white relations, this interdisciplinary collection explores the growth, impact, and significance of rapidly growing Asian American populations in the American South. Avoiding the usual focus on the East and West Coasts, several essays attend to the nuanced ways in which Asian Americans negotiate the dominant black and white racial binary, while others provoke readers to reconsider the supposed cultural isolation of the region, reintroducing the South within a historical web of global networks across the Caribbean, Pacific, and Atlantic. Contributors are Vivek Bald, Leslie Bow, Amy Brandzel, Daniel Bronstein, Jigna Desai, Jennifer Ho, Khyati Y. Joshi, ChangHwan Kim, Marguerite Nguyen, Purvi Shah, Arthur Sakamoto, Jasmine Tang, Isao Takei, and Roy Vu.

Discusses the South Asian community in America including the history of political activism, an analysis of the shifting ideas of culture, and examines the wave of violence the community experienced right after September 11.

“. . . to suddenly discover yourself existing . . . .” Our Stories: An Introduction to South Asian America is an anthology rooted in community. Bringing together the voices of sixty-four authors—including a wide range of scholars, artists, journalists, and community members—Our Stories weaves together the myriad histories, experiences, perspectives, and identities that make up the South Asian American community. This volume consists of ten chapters that explore both the history of South Asian America, spanning from the 1780s through the present day, and various aspects of the South Asian American experience, from civic engagement to family. Each chapter offers stories of struggle, resistance, inspiration, and joy that disrupt dominant narratives that have erased South Asian Americans’ role in U.S. history and made restrictions on our belonging. By combining these narratives, Our Stories illustrates the diversity, vibrancy, and power of the South Asian American community.

Leading scholars and practitioners come together in this contributed volume to present the most current evidence on cutting edge health issues for South Asian Americans, the fastest growing Asian American population. The book spans a variety of health topics while examining disparities and special health needs for this population. Subjects discussed include: cancer, obesity, HIV/AIDS, women's health, LGBTQ health and mental health. Health of South Asians in the United States presents research-based recommendations to help determine priorities for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, education, and policies which will optimize the health and well-being of South Asian American communities in the United States. Although aimed at both students, healthcare professionals and policy makers, this book will prove to be useful to anyone interested in the health and well-being of the South Asian communities in the United States.

For immigrants to America, from Europeans in the early twentieth century through later Latinos, Asians, and Caribbeans, gaining social and political ground has generally been considered an exercise in ethnic and racial solidarity. The experience of South Asian Americans, one of the fastest-growing immigrant populations in recent years, tells a different story of inclusion—one in which distinctions within a group play a significant role. Focusing on Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi American communities, Sangay K. Mishra analyzes features such as class, religion, nation of origin, language, caste, gender, and sexuality in mobilization. He shows how these internal characteristics lead to multiple paths of political inclusion, defying a unified group experience. How, for instance, has religion shaped the fractured political response to intensified discrimination against South Asians—Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs—in the post-9/11 period? How have class and home country concerns played into various strategies for achieving political power? And how do the political engagements of professional and entrepreneurial segments of the community challenge the idea of a unified diaspora? Pursuing answers, Mishra argues that, while ethnoracial mobilization remains an important component of South Asian American experience, ethnoracial identity is deployed differently by particular sectors of the South Asian population to produce very specific kinds of mobilizing and organizational infrastructures. And exploring these distinctions is critical to understanding the changing nature of the politics of immigrant inclusion—and difference itself—in America.

Who gets to be American? -- Mozumdar crosses the Pacific -- The American dream -- Where are you from? -- Defining whiteness -- The differences between daylight and darkness -- The dilemma -- Return to Hindoo Alley -- Freedom fighters -- Citizenship on trial -- The aftermath -- The path to acceptance -- War -- Resolution.