Uncle Swami
South Asians in America Today
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- $28.99
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center, misdirected assaults on Sikhs and other South Asians flared on streets across the nation, serving as harbingers of a more suspicious, less discerning, and increasingly fearful world view that would drastically change ideas of belonging and acceptance in America.
Weaving together distinct strands of recent South Asian immigration to the United States, Uncle Swami creates a richly textured analysis of the systems and sentiments behind shifting notions of cultural identity in a post 9/11 world. Vijay Prashad continues the conversation sparked by his celebrated work The Karma of Brown Folk and confronts the experience of migration across an expanse of generations and class divisions, from the birth of political activism among second generation immigrants to the meteoric rise of South Asian American politicians in Republican circles to the migrant workers who suffer in the name of American capitalism.
A powerful new indictment of American imperialism at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Uncle Swami restores a diasporic community to its full-fledged complexity, beyond model minorities and the specters of terrorism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As Trinity College's South Asian history professor Prashad (The Karma of Brown Folk) writes, for South Asian Americans, "the miasma of international relations interrupts our lives constantly." His latest begins by illustrating the ways in which Islamophobia and hate crimes ran rife against South Asians after 9/11 tensions exacerbated by outsourced jobs and the growing unemployment rate. Random screenings on mass transit, mistaken detainment, and deportation are among the trials this population faced under legislation like the Patriot Act. To rectify the misinformation, Prashad explains how immigration policy and labor laws shaped South Asian culture, from the prolific rise of the Patels in the hotel industry to indentured servitude in post-Katrina New Orleans. In addition, he traces the rise of South Asian political activism from WWI through the 9/11 attacks that pressured South Asians to unite across disparate cultural and religious lines. Prashad impressively shows how culture and community are intrinsically tied to politics, while addressing nuances in a culture often marginalized by the media.
