A Patchwork Shawl
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In the 1960s, Shamita Das Dasgupta moved from India to the United States with her husband. They settled in the Midwest, feeling culturally stranded and pressured on all sides to cut loose ties to their mother country while taking on the customs of their adopted land. In A Patchwork Shawl, Dasgupta works to make sense of the divide she and her children straddle, as do other essay writers from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan. "Such a Catch-22!" writes Naheed Hasnat in the essay "Being 'Amreekan.'" "Your classmates do not think you are American enough, and your parents think you're too Westernized. At school you are the strange brown kid trying to fit in. At home, you are forgetting your cultural customs, beginning to like fried chicken more than chicken tikka, and choosing to speak English over Urdu."
Some contributors speak to the difficulty of maintaining a personal identity unacceptable to the community. After her mother warned her not to publicly admit she was lesbian because Pakistanis who learned this might "break your legs, mutilate your face," Surina Khan turned her back on her heritage and family. Only after her mother grudgingly began to accept her sexual identity did she start searching for other "South Asian queers" in an effort to quell the isolation she felt. Other writers talk of issues like marital rape and domestic violence or challenge stereotypes like the image of South Asian women as meek and unassertive. This rich, wide-ranging collection illustrates the differences and similarities between these women as they try to strike a balance between feeling cradled and strangled by the strength of their roots. --Francesca Coltrera
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
The term "woman/women of color" is widely accepted in the United States and Canada as a category to distinguish nonwhite women from women of European ethnicity. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
immigrant bourgeoisie, patchwork shawl, model minority, film dance Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
South Asian, United States, New York, India Day, Independence Day, Asian American, North America, Sri Lanka, Oxford University Press, Asian Indians, New Delhi, Pacific Islanders, Public Culture, San Francisco, Bharat Natyam, Civil Rights, India Abroad, Kama Sutra, Pakistani Muslim, Jai Hind, Los Angeles, Mother India, Saudi Arabia, Spirit of India, The Gift of Utter Daring New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
The term "woman/women of color" is widely accepted in the United States and Canada as a category to distinguish nonwhite women from women of European ethnicity. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
immigrant bourgeoisie, patchwork shawl, model minority, film dance Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
South Asian, United States, New York, India Day, Independence Day, Asian American, North America, Sri Lanka, Oxford University Press, Asian Indians, New Delhi, Pacific Islanders, Public Culture, San Francisco, Bharat Natyam, Civil Rights, India Abroad, Kama Sutra, Pakistani Muslim, Jai Hind, Los Angeles, Mother India, Saudi Arabia, Spirit of India, The Gift of Utter Daring New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 52
books:
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16
books
cite this book:
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- Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America by Joan M. Jensen in Front Matter, page 184, and page 185
- Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History by Kumkum Sangari on page 92, page 184, and page 185
- The Asian Indian Experience in the United States by Parmatma Saran in Front Matter, page 127, and page 182
- Construction of Communalism In Colonial India by Gyanendra Pandey on page 183, and page 185
- The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir on page 136, and page 143
See all 52 books this book cites
- Speaking the Unspeakable: Marital Violence among South Asian Immigrants in the United States by Margaret Abraham in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Ethnic Routes to Becoming American: Indian Immigrants and the Cultures of Citizenship by Sharmila Rudrappa in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace by Rachel C. Lee on page 248
- New Immigrants in New York by Nancy Foner on page 27
- A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation by Diana L. Eck in Back Matter
See all 16 books citing this book
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