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.
Where Are You From? Middle-Class Migrants in the Modern World
About the Book
Reviews
“A significant contribution to literature on South Asian diaspora, ethnicity in Britain, and multiculturalism.”—Meena Khandelwal American Ethnologist
“Offers fascinating insights . . . . A useful addition to contemporary scholarship on ethnic identity. . . . Essential reading for scholars of the South Asian Diaspora today.”—American Journal Of Sociology / AJS
"Where Are You From? is a useful addition to contemporary scholarship on ethnic identity. It is certainly essential reading for scholars of the South Asian diaspora today."—American Journal Of Sociology / AJS
“A new insight into the ethnic conflicts and cutlural nostalgia of middle-class migrants in the modern age.”—India Today
"This is an important book, which should be required reading on courses in religious studies . . . will certainly be high on my list for graduate students of religious education. It is also an immensely readable book, rich with finely observed vignettes of individuals' cultural mixes."—Eleanor Nesbitt Journal Of Intl Migration & Integration
“An engagingly written, original, and wide-ranging approach to the study of an ethnic minority population...Deserves a more general readership.”—Katharine Charsley Journal Of The Royal Anthropological Inst
"Dhooleka Raj takes us into the Punjabi Hindu world in London in a very personal way, throwing light on the development of heightened religious identities in the diaspora and on Indian immigrant concerns with racial, national, and transnational identities. This engaging ethnography will enable better analytical comparisons across the Indian diasporic world."—Karen Leonard, author of The South Asian Americans
"A trenchantly written, closely observed account of the complexities that lurk behind the innocent-sounding question that frames this revelatory book. In Where Are You From?, Raj brings the situated engagement of the committed ethnographer to bear critically on fashionable simplifications about diaspora, identity, and the nation-state. She challenges, in a no-nonsense and grounded fashion, both our own theoretical pontifications and official platitudes about what constitutes 'British' and 'Asian' identity. In unraveling an exclusionary rhetoric of culture, she shines a much-needed searchlight onto the mutually supportive hypocrisies and uncured sores of postcolonial sensibility, and does so right at the heart of one of their major historical and cultural sources."—Michael Herzfeld, author of Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State
" A critical and insightful ethnographic study on a timely and consequential topic. Where Are You From? is an important and original contribution both to the anthropology of ethnicity and to critical studies of multiculturalism."—James Ferguson, author of Expectations of Modernity
"An inventive, insightful, discerning look at what it means to live transnationally, sometimes without ever crossing a border. In this compelling account of global connection, multicultural politics and migration stories relate back to histories of dislocation, nation-states, 'new racism,' and communities made in the moment, rather than a 'homeland' in any simple sense. By freeing ethnicity from the trope of loss and the trap of cultural nostalgia, Raj encourages readers to think afresh about why difference can be experienced so very differently."—Kath Weston, author of Gender in Real Time and Families We Choose
"Against attacks on ethnicity studies in Britain, Raj's book contains illuminating ethnographic vignettes highlighting the long-term cultural and historical trends that set affluent Hindu Punjabi immigrant-settlers in London apart from fellow Punjabi Sikhs and Muslims, and, indeed, from other British Hindus, and from Black and White Britons."—Pnina Werbner, Professor of Social Anthropology, Keele University, United Kingdom
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"A trenchantly written, closely observed account of the complexities that lurk behind the innocent-sounding question that frames this revelatory book. In Where Are You From?, Raj brings the situated engagement of the committed ethnographer to bear critically on fashionable simplifications about diaspora, identity, and the nation-state. She challenges, in a no-nonsense and grounded fashion, both our own theoretical pontifications and official platitudes about what constitutes 'British' and 'Asian' identity. In unraveling an exclusionary rhetoric of culture, she shines a much-needed searchlight onto the mutually supportive hypocrisies and uncured sores of postcolonial sensibility, and does so right at the heart of one of their major historical and cultural sources."—Michael Herzfeld, author of Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State
" A critical and insightful ethnographic study on a timely and consequential topic. Where Are You From? is an important and original contribution both to the anthropology of ethnicity and to critical studies of multiculturalism."—James Ferguson, author of Expectations of Modernity
"An inventive, insightful, discerning look at what it means to live transnationally, sometimes without ever crossing a border. In this compelling account of global connection, multicultural politics and migration stories relate back to histories of dislocation, nation-states, 'new racism,' and communities made in the moment, rather than a 'homeland' in any simple sense. By freeing ethnicity from the trope of loss and the trap of cultural nostalgia, Raj encourages readers to think afresh about why difference can be experienced so very differently."—Kath Weston, author of Gender in Real Time and Families We Choose
"Against attacks on ethnicity studies in Britain, Raj's book contains illuminating ethnographic vignettes highlighting the long-term cultural and historical trends that set affluent Hindu Punjabi immigrant-settlers in London apart from fellow Punjabi Sikhs and Muslims, and, indeed, from other British Hindus, and from Black and White Britons."—Pnina Werbner, Professor of Social Anthropology, Keele University, United Kingdom
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