Where Are You From?: Middle-Class Migrants in the Modern World / Edition 1

by Dhooleka Sarhadi Raj

Overview

Dhooleka S. Raj explores the complexities of ethnic minority cultural change in this incisive examination of first- and second-generation middle-class South Asian families living in London. Challenging prevalent understandings of ethnicity that equate community, culture, and identity, Raj considers how transnational ethnic minorities are circumscribed by nostalgia for culture.

Where Are You From? argues that the nostalgia for culture obscures the complexities of change in migrant minority lives and limits the ways the politics of diversity can be imagined by the nation. Based on ethnographic research with Indian migrants and their children, this book examines how categories of identity, culture, community, and nation are negotiated and often equated.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520233836
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/25/2003
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1300L (what's this?)

About the Author

Dhooleka S. Raj is a Visiting Scholar in Women's Studies at Harvard University. She was formerly a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and Smuts-Hinduja Fellow at the Center for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface

1. Questions of Ethnicity
2. Being Vilayati, Becoming Asian: Keeping up with the Kapurs, the Chawlas, the Kalias, and the Aggarwals in London
3. "I Am From Nowhere": Partition and Being Punjabi
4. Becoming a Hindu Community
5. The Search for a Suitable Boy
6. Becoming British Asian: Intergenerational Negotiations of Racism
7. Being British, Becoming a Person of Indian Origin
8. "Where Are You Originally From?" Multiculturalism, Citizenship, and Transnational Differences

Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index