Description
Book SynopsisIn National (un)Belonging: Bengali American Women on Imagining and Contesting Culture and Identity, Roksana Badruddoja focuses on the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship, and nationalism among contemporary "second-generation" Bengali American women. Badruddoja engages in a yearlong feminist ethnographic study with a nationwide sample of 25 women in the U.S. to poignantly explore perceptions about daily social and cultural practices.
Exploring the conceptual and theoretical perspectives of the social, economic, cultural, aesthetic, and political dimensions of transnational migrations, Badruddoja interrogates assimilation to depict the messy nature of diasporic movement and the resulting complexities of diasporic identities. Badruddoja demonstrates racialized identities are often part of a constellation of loyalties that are multiple, contradictory, constantly shifting, and overlapping.
Table of ContentsForeword: Telling America’s Whole Story
1 The Cheshire Cat Vexing Identities
1 Experience/Theory
2 Theoretical and Methodological Implications
3 Under-heard and Under-theorized Identities
4 Contribution to the Literature
5 Contesting Unitary Self
2 Impossible Subjects (Re)Collecting South Asian American Im/migration
1 Welcome Desis … Not!: 1965 to 1990
2 abcd s and (Constructed) Manifest Contradictions
3 From Research to Process Social Research, Feminist Scholarship, and Women’s Subjectivities
1 Researching Dislocated Women
2 Exploring the Unexplored
3 Bengalis in the Limelight
4 Access Granted
5 Analyze This … Analyze That
6 Non-oppression to Negotiation of Power
4 Racial and Ethnic Imaginary Projects of (Re)Negotiation
1 Contesting Race
2 Racing Ethnicity
3 The Racial Beast
3.1 Second-Generation?!?! I Thought I Was First!
3.2 abcd and fob (American-Born Confused Desi and Fresh Off the Boat)
3.3 I Am Desi
5 Patrolling the Cultural Fences Community Place-Making
1 Culture: No Culture as to South Asian: American
2 Third World Women: Culture = Color = Oppression
6 Territories of the Self Language, Holidays, Religion, Food, and Clothing
1 Benglish
2 Masala Turkey
3 Spiritual Ethnicity
4 Not Village India
5 Ethnic Chic
7 Project of “Home” “Where Are You From?”
1 “Where Are You Really From?”
2 Mobile Diasporas
8 Cultural Autonomy Boundaries of Marriage
1 Suitable Boy (Feminized Cultural Carriers)
2 “How Old Is Your Daughter?” (Masculinist Cultural Production)
3 (Un)Suitable Boy (Changing Contours of Boundaries)
4 “I Don’t Want to Have to Explain Everything about Myself!”
5 Love-Cum-Arranged
9 Tropologies of Queerness Sexuality, Family, and Culture
1 Rupa
1.1 Not Muslim … but Muslim
1.2 Challenging Whiteness, Patriarchy, and Heteronormativity
1.3 Subjectivity and Managing Identities (Sexuality, Family, and Culture)
2 Ronica
2.1 Rupturing White/Feminist/Queer Canon
2.2 Negotiating the Model Minority Myth
2.3 Confronting Sexual and Ethnoracial Binaries
10 Consolidation of the American Nation-State South Asian Diasporic Fiction
1 Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days
2 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Arranged Marriage
3 Tanuja Desai Hidier’s Born Confused
4 Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
11 Contesting the Unitary Self The abcd Conundrum and Sites of Intervention
1 Dissenting Spaces and the Changing Landscape of Otherness
1.1 Lesson 1: Identity Grammar and Shifts
1.2 Lesson 2: Marginality as a Space of Power
2 Becoming South Asian American (Over and Over Again)
References
Index
