Brown Women Have Everything - by Sayantani Dasgupta

About the Book

"As a child growing up in New Delhi, Sayantani Dasgupta wanted to go on adventures involving shipwrecks and treasure chests. Her parents wanted her to stay in school instead. She satisfied her curiosity by drawing maps, inventing languages with friends, and reading everything: English adventures, Russian folktales, Hindi comics, Bengali ghost stories. Brown Women Have Everything embraces the same spirit of wonder as we follow Dasgupta, now living and teaching in the United States, to cathedrals in Italy, pirate graveyards in North Carolina, hair salons in Idaho, her aunt's kitchen in Bangladesh, graffiti-lined streets of Colombia, the hierarchical world of academia, and her marriage to a handsome Sikh. As she moves through the world, she examines issues of the body, violence, travel, and belonging with a mix of humor, joy, pride, and outrage. While the eighteen interwoven essays in this collection call out bigotry, bias, and othering, they ultimately celebrate the ties that bind our disparate, global lives together"--

Book Synopsis

As a child growing up in New Delhi, Sayantani Dasgupta wanted to go on adventures involving shipwrecks and treasure chests. Her parents wanted her to stay in school instead. She satisfied her curiosity by drawing maps, inventing languages with friends, and reading everything: English adventures, Russian folktales, Hindi comics, Bengali ghost stories.

Brown Women Have Everything embraces the same spirit of wonder as we follow Dasgupta, now living and teaching in the United States, to cathedrals in Italy, pirate graveyards in North Carolina, hair salons in Idaho, her aunt's kitchen in Bangladesh, graffiti-lined streets of Colombia, the hierarchical world of academia, and her marriage to a handsome Sikh. As she moves through the world, she examines issues of the body, violence, travel, and belonging with a mix of humor, joy, pride, and outrage. While the eighteen interwoven essays in this collection call out bigotry, bias, and othering, they ultimately celebrate the ties that bind our disparate, global lives together.

Review Quotes

"Taken together, the titles of [Dasgupta's] essay and story collection arrive at something bigger. . . . Dasgupta's stories and essays show what women have and haven't had, in India and the US, in reality and representation, in present and past generations. And Dasgupta has the ability to hold all of these in her arms at once--many dialectics--and make them clear to us, lining them up in tidy rows of words on pages in a book of essays for others to hold as well."--North Carolina Literary Review

"What does it mean to look at the world with curiosity? Sayantani Dasgupta's new collection exemplifies and redefines this question . . . . Brown Women Have Everything leaves no stone unturned as it weaves together historical milestones, an inspection of family heritage, and sharp insights into the workings of interpersonal relationships . . . . What distinguishes Dasgupta from other essayists is her capacity to balance reverence for joyous and vibrant moments with a sense of discomfort that permeates the collection . . . . Multiple bouts of discomfort ultimately transform into delight."--Barrelhouse

"Dasgupta encounters and offers up for consideration issues such as privilege, racism, the intellectual and emotional facets of multilingualism, the exoticising of another culture (hers, for instance), and guns in America."--Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

"Perceptive and personal . . . . Dasgupta has a talent for finding the profound in the everyday."--Publishers Weekly

"Witty, thoughtful reading . . . . As she explores issues of race, culture, and gender, Dasgupta's lively, intelligent book celebrates the "honor and dignity" of embracing the discomforts of the transnational life, which offers the unexpected rewards and delights of the unfamiliar."--Kirkus Reviews