Contents: Introduction/Somdatta Mandal and Himadri Lahiri. I. Theoretical Paradigms: 1. 'Eat Me America': some aspects of Indian writing in America/Mohan Ramanan. 2. Political realities and the colors of imagination/Jasbir Jain. 3. Traveling with walls: the South Asian intellectual in the United States/Manju Jaidka. 4. The text as narrative: reading ideology/Sukalpa Bhattacharjee. 5. Crossing borders: in search of Aesthetics/Himadri Lahiri. II. Chinese American Voices: 6. Racist stereotyping and contemporary Chinese American literature/Gulshan Rai Kataria. 7. American circumstances and Chinese character: narrative strategies in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club/Gonul Pultar. III. African American Voices: 8. African American drama's journey towards the centrestage/Jap Preet Kaur Bhangu. 9. Ballad of a dream deferred: blackness and bleakness in the poetry of Langston Hughes/Mina Surjeet Singh. 10. Folk creativity as a subversive gesture in Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God/Punam Gupta. 11. Racism and the literature of protest in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man/R.G. Kulkarni. IV. Indian American Voices: 12. "A Forest On Fire": the literary imagination of Meena Alexander/E. Nageswara Rao. 13. Questing otherness along the fault lines/Nila Das. 14. Straddling two worlds: diasporic dislocation in Vijay Lakshmi's Pomegranate Dreams/Anil Raina. 15. 'Stuck In Dead Space': the sense and sensibility of the Indian American in Bharati Mukherjee's short stories/Anu Celly. 16. Tightrope Walk: Relationships in multicultural space/Ila Rathor. 17. Cultural displacement in the stories of Anjana Appachana and Shauna Singh Baldwin/Alka Saxena. 18. Strictly male voice: a study of Prem Chopra's Salaam New York/Eami Mathew. V. Other Voices: 19. "The Ignored Americans Speak": critiquing native American female voices/Mukul Sengupta. 20. Robin White's works: a reverse navigation/I.H-Shihan. 21. Past the 'Shadow' and the 'Silence': Interpreting Arab American women's poetry/Indrani Datta Chaudhuri. 22. Self and the Southern Heritage: a reappraisal of the short fiction of Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty/Pratibha Nagpal. VI. Intercultural Studies: 23. Ethnic tribulations in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and William Styron's Sophie's Choice/K.B. Razdan. 24. Ideology and attitude towards nature: a comparative study of Claude McKay and Bharathidasan/S.S. Kumar. 25. Politics of Complexity: mapping the space of multiethnic 'Herstories'/Deepshikha Kotwal. 26. 'Within and without Margins': cross-cultural spaces in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Kingston's The Woman Warrior/Shukla Saha. VII. The Performing Arts: 27. The South Asian Diaspora vis-a-vis the Ubiquitous Bhangra/Somdatta Mandal. 28. From the margin to the mainstream: analyzing Manoj Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense/Manpreet Kaur Kang. VIII. American Studies and Its Future: 29. MELUS: Where Shall We Go From Here?/Mohan Ramanan.
"In the present-day multicultural world, the issue of identifying an individual's space becomes a topic of significant concern, particularly for an immigrant writer who is already burdened with issues of immigration, acculturation, and identity politics. The present anthology brings together selected papers from the 2003 MELUS-India National Conference on "South Asians in the United States: The Diasporic Experience" and the 2004 International Conference on "Scene, Space, Scenario: Contexts of multi-Ethnic literatures in the Americas." Among the many contributors are Jasbir Jain, Manju Jaidka, E. Nageswara Rao, Mohan Ramanan, I.H-Shihan and Gonul Pultar. The essays deal with a wide variety of themes and have been classified under several sub-headings: Theoretical Paradigms, Indian American, Chinese American, African American Voices, Intercultural Studies, the Performing Arts and so on. The volume purports to make a rich contribution to the areas of Asian American studies, ethnic studies, immigrant literature and comparative studies." (jacket)
