Search results for ""Author Vivek Bald""

Book SynopsisNineteenth-century Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island, bags heavy with silks from their villages in Bengal. Demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s boardwalks to the segregated South. Bald’s history reveals cross-racial affinities below the surface of early twentieth-century America.Trade Review[Bald] has produced an engaging account of a largely untold wave of immigration: Muslims from British India who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. -- Sam Roberts * New York Times *A revelatory book… Vivek Bald’s new book on Bengali migration tells a history that has been largely unknown. -- Mini Basu * CNN.com *Bald’s meticulously researched Bengali Harlem is about Indian sailors who jumped ship on the eastern seaboard during the early twentieth century. These men became blue-collar workers and married African American and Latina women, and their lives suggest a heterogeneity and hopefulness in the immigrant experience that is sometimes ignored. -- Hirsh Sawhney * Times Literary Supplement *Captur[es] a unique narrative of inter-marriage and inter-ethnic community making in America. -- Yogendra Yadav * Indian Express *Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America is a landmark work at exhuming an unknown past of South Asian emigration… It deals in fascinating detail with the little-known narrative of Muslim men travelling from undivided Bengal from the 1880s onwards to seek a living in the U.S. -- Shamik Bag * Mint *Bald opens readers’ eyes to a rarely depicted part of the U.S. melting pot. -- Richard Pretorius * The National *A revelatory account of how the first Bengali migrants quietly merged into America’s iconic neighbourhoods. -- Mohua Das * The Telegraph (Calcutta) *Bald vividly recreates the history of South Asian migration to the U.S. from the 1880s through the 1960s. Drawing on ships’ logs, census records, marriage documents, local news items, the memoir of an Indian Communist refugee, and interviews with descendants, Bald reconstructs the stories of the Muslim silk peddlers who arrived in 1880s during the fin-de-siècle fascination for Orientalism; the seamen from colonial India who jumped ship at ports along the Eastern seaboard; and the Creole, African-American, and Puerto Rican women they married. Bald persuasively shows how these immigrants provide us with a ‘different picture of assimilation.’ Global labor migrants, they did not necessarily come seeking a better way of life, nor did they follow a path of upward mobility. In the cases of the silk peddlers who maintained ties to the subcontinent to obtain their goods, they forged extensive global networks yet also assimilated into black neighborhoods, building multiethnic families and communities at a time of exclusionary immigration laws against Asians. By the 1940s, those who stayed had followed the jobs, becoming auto or steel workers in the Midwest, storekeepers in the South, and hotdog vendors or restaurant workers in Manhattan, and, thanks to their wives, had quietly blended into neighborhoods such as Harlem, West Baltimore, Treme in New Orleans and Black Bottom in Detroit. * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *Vivek Bald’s extraordinary account persuasively places these first Bengali migrants at the heart of our multiracial American experience. A virtuoso act of recovery. -- Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar WaoVivek Bald’s work on this untold story is meticulously researched, movingly told, and absolutely timely. -- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of An Aesthetic Education in the Era of GlobalizationVivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem is a monumental achievement. It brings to life a slice of the U.S. population unknown to the history books: South Asian migrants who came into the United States between the 1890s and the 1940s, making their lives in between African American and migrant spaces. Elegantly assembled, the stories of these migrants and their families are fascinating and heart-rending. -- Vijay Prashad, author of Uncle Swami: South Asians in America TodayGrounded in extraordinary research, Bengali Harlem reveals how South Asians became an integral part of black and Puerto Rican communities in the early years of the twentieth century. Historians of black life, culture, and commerce will never again be able to ignore the South Asian presence in African American communities and families. -- George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

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Book SynopsisThese essays reveal how the South Asian diaspora has been shaped by the contours of U.S. imperialismTrade ReviewThis unique collection spans over 100 years of South Asian migration to the U.S., offering us a rich history of early immigrants and migrants, undocumented workers and ship stowaways, and the anti-colonial activists of the early 20th centuries whose histories have largely been ignored. The essays unfold within a theoretical framework of 'empire and global power' to provide complex analyses of the transnational mobility of understudied populations and feature meticulous archival work that reveals the alliances that early South Asians made with Mexicans, Irish, Chinese, and African Americans. -- Rajini Srikanth,author of Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in U.S. Literature and LawThe Sun Never Setsopens up radically new ways to think about diaspora that have so far privileged origins. By brilliantly dislodging nation-state derived ideals of origins, immigration, and restriction, the essays in this collection hone in on the lived experiences of sojourning and settlement through the vantage point of the immigrants themselves. An exciting new paradigm for Asian American Studies,The Sun Never Setswill bethepoint of reference for how to understand immigration in the United States. -- Sharmila Rudrappa,University of Texas at AustinTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu VimalasseryPart I. Overlapping Empires 1 Intimate Dependency, Race, and Trans-Imperial Migration Nayan Shah 2 Repressing the "Hindu Menace"Seema Sohi 3 Desertion and SeditionVivek Bald 4 "The Hidden Hand"Sujani ReddyPart II. From Imperialism to Free-Market Fundamentalism 5 Putting "the Family" to WorkMiabi Chatterji 6 Looking Home Linta Varghese 7 India's Global and Internal Labor Migration and ResistanceImmanuel Ness 8 Water for Life, Not for Coca-Cola Amanda Ciafone 9 When an Interpreter Could Not Be FoundNaeem MohaiemenPart III. Geographies of Migration, Settlement, and Self 10 Intertwined Violence: Implications of State Responses to Domestic Violence in South Asian Immigrant Communities Soniya Munshi 11 Who's Your Daddy? Queer Diasporic Framings of the RegionGayatri Gopinath 12 Awaiting the Twelfth Imam in the United StatesRaza Mir and Farah Hasan 13 Tracing the Muslim BodyJunaid Rana 14 Antecedents of Imperial IncarcerationManu VimalasseryAfterword Vijay PrashadIndexAbout the Contributors

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Book SynopsisExplores the growth, impact, and significance of rapidly growing Asian American populations in the American South.Trade ReviewA Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2014. "A timely and necessary contribution to multiple fields of inquiry, including southern history and studies, immigration history, urban history, foreign relations history, U.S. history writ large, religious studies, American studies, ethnic studies, and Asian American studies. . . . Fresh and forward-looking, Asian Americans in Dixie should serve as a launching pad for new directions in the histories of race, migration, and the U.S. South."--The Journal of Southern History "This collection brings valuable attention to the largely overlooked experiences of Asian Americans in the southern US. . . . An important contribution to Asian American studies. Essential."--Choice "Delving into the complex history of race and ethnicity in the American South, these scholars explore the ways in which Asian Americans must be part of that narrative, both past and present. This book will have great potential as a teaching tool in Asian American studies and Southern studies."--Krystyn R. Moon, author of Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s"Delving into the complex history of race and ethnicity in the American South, these scholars explore the ways in which Asian Americans must be part of that narrative, both past and present. This book will have great potential as a teaching tool in Asian American studies and Southern studies."--Krystyn R. Moon, author of Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s

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Book SynopsisThese essays reveal how the South Asian diaspora has been shaped by the contours of U.S. imperialismTrade ReviewThis unique collection spans over 100 years of South Asian migration to the U.S., offering us a rich history of early immigrants and migrants, undocumented workers and ship stowaways, and the anti-colonial activists of the early 20th centuries whose histories have largely been ignored. The essays unfold within a theoretical framework of 'empire and global power' to provide complex analyses of the transnational mobility of understudied populations and feature meticulous archival work that reveals the alliances that early South Asians made with Mexicans, Irish, Chinese, and African Americans. -- Rajini Srikanth,author of Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in U.S. Literature and LawThe Sun Never Setsopens up radically new ways to think about diaspora that have so far privileged origins. By brilliantly dislodging nation-state derived ideals of origins, immigration, and restriction, the essays in this collection hone in on the lived experiences of sojourning and settlement through the vantage point of the immigrants themselves. An exciting new paradigm for Asian American Studies,The Sun Never Setswill bethepoint of reference for how to understand immigration in the United States. -- Sharmila Rudrappa,University of Texas at AustinTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu VimalasseryPart I. Overlapping Empires 1 Intimate Dependency, Race, and Trans-Imperial Migration Nayan Shah 2 Repressing the "Hindu Menace"Seema Sohi 3 Desertion and SeditionVivek Bald 4 "The Hidden Hand"Sujani ReddyPart II. From Imperialism to Free-Market Fundamentalism 5 Putting "the Family" to WorkMiabi Chatterji 6 Looking Home Linta Varghese 7 India's Global and Internal Labor Migration and ResistanceImmanuel Ness 8 Water for Life, Not for Coca-Cola Amanda Ciafone 9 When an Interpreter Could Not Be FoundNaeem MohaiemenPart III. Geographies of Migration, Settlement, and Self 10 Intertwined Violence: Implications of State Responses to Domestic Violence in South Asian Immigrant Communities Soniya Munshi 11 Who's Your Daddy? Queer Diasporic Framings of the RegionGayatri Gopinath 12 Awaiting the Twelfth Imam in the United StatesRaza Mir and Farah Hasan 13 Tracing the Muslim BodyJunaid Rana 14 Antecedents of Imperial IncarcerationManu VimalasseryAfterword Vijay PrashadIndexAbout the Contributors

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