Description
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 serves as an expression 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 and 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, shared race and class, and desires 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.
Chapter
Introduction. Mad for Difference: Authenticity, Ambivalence, and the Cosmopolitan South Asian American Reder
1. The Glue That Keeps Us Together: Constructing Ethnic Community in the NetSAP Book Club
2. There’s a Whole Other Class: Model Minorities, Privileged Subjects, and the Question of Caste
3. A Narrow View of the World: Gendered Literary Culture and South Asian American Belonging
4. Thinking and Feeling with Her: Representation and Affect in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
Afterword. Beyond Ambivalence?
Appendix 1. List of Interviewees
Appendix 2. Book Club Meetings Attended (2006–2007, 2009–2010)
Appendix 3. Complete List of Books Read by the NetSAP-DC Book Club, 1998–2014
Appendix 4. Interview Questions for NetSAP Book Club Interviewees
Reading Together, Reading Apart
：Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community
( Asian American Experience )
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