American Karma

by Bhatia, Sunil

• ISBN13: 9780814799598
• ISBN10: 0814799590
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-08-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

The Indian American community is one of the fastest growing immigrant communities in the U.S. Unlike previous generations, they are marked by a high degree of training as medical doctors, engineers, scientists, and university professors.American Karmadraws on participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore how these highly skilled professionals have been inserted into the racial dynamics of American society and transformed into "people of color." Focusing on first-generation, middle-class Indians in American suburbia, it also sheds light on how these transnational immigrants themselves come to understand and negotiate their identities.Bhatia forcefully contends that to fully understand migrant identity and cultural formation it is essential that psychologists and others think of selfhood as firmly intertwined with sociocultural factors such as colonialism, gender, language, immigration, and race-based immigration laws.American Karmaoffers a new framework for thinking about the construction of selfhood and identity in the context of immigration. This innovative approach advances the field of psychology by incorporating critical issues related to the concept of culture, including race, power, and conflict, and will also provide key insights to those in anthropology, sociology, human development, and migrant studies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
American Karma: Race, Place, and Identity in the Indian Diaspora	p. 12
Qualitative Inquiry and Psychology: Doing Ethnography in Transnational Cultures	p. 42
Des-Pardes in the American Suburbia: Narratives from the Suburban Indian Diaspora	p. 74
Saris, Chutney Sandwiches, and "Thick Accents": Constructing Difference	p. 112
Racism and Glass Ceilings: Repositioning Difference	p. 155
Analyzing Assignations and Assertions: The Enigma of Brown Privilege	p. 184
Imagining Homes: Identity in Transnational Diasporas	p. 220
Notes	p. 235
Bibliography	p. 243
Index	p. 257
About the Author	p. 271
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