Uncle Swami - by Vijay Prashad (Paperback)

About the Book

Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center, misdirected assaults on Sikhs and other South Asians flared in communities across the nation, serving as harbingers of a more suspicious, less discerning, and increasingly fearful worldview that would drastically change ideas of belonging and acceptance in America.
Weaving together distinct strands of recent South Asian immigration to the United States, "Uncle Swami" examines a diverse and dynamic people whose identities are all too often lumped together, glossed over, or simply misunderstood. Vijay Prashad confronts the experience of migration across an expanse of generations and class divisions, from the birth of political activism among second-generation immigrants and the meteoric rise of South Asian American politicians in Republican circles to migrant workers at the mercy of the vicissitudes of the American free market.
Described as "eye-opening" ("Kirkus Reviews"), "bound to spark discussion" ("Booklist"), and "required reading for anyone who wants to understand race, assimilation, and patriotism ("The Boston Globe"), "Uncle Swami" restores a diasporic community to its full-fledged complexity beyond both model minorities and the specters of terrorism.

Book Synopsis

Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center, misdirected assaults on Sikhs and other South Asians flared in communities across the nation, serving as harbingers of a more suspicious, less discerning, and increasingly fearful worldview that would drastically change ideas of belonging and acceptance in America.

Weaving together distinct strands of recent South Asian immigration to the United States, Uncle Swami examines a diverse and dynamic people whose identities are all too often lumped together, glossed over, or simply misunderstood. Vijay Prashad confronts the experience of migration across an expanse of generations and class divisions, from the birth of political activism among second-generation immigrants and the meteoric rise of South Asian American politicians in Republican circles to migrant workers at the mercy of the vicissitudes of the American free market.

Described as "eye-opening" (Kirkus Reviews), "bound to spark discussion" (Booklist), and "required reading for anyone who wants to understand race, assimilation, and patriotism (The Boston Globe), Uncle Swami restores a diasporic community to its full-fledged complexity beyond both model minorities and the specters of terrorism.

Review Quotes

"A passionate book that situates 'Indian America' within its own diversified history and alliances in the United States, within the complex histories of national liberation and Hindu nationalism in India, as well as within the spectrum of struggles in the United States."
--Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University

"Vijay Prashad is our own Frantz Fanon. His writing of protest is always tinged with the beauty of hope."
--Amitava Kumar, author of Passport Photos

"With unflinching clarity and deep compassion, [Prashad] mines the post-9/11 landscape to locate the source of an emerging collective identity as the racial other."
--Rinku Sen, Applied Research Center, and publisher of Colorlines

"This compelling and carefully researched account reveals not only the contradictions in America's treatment of its South Asian immigrants, but the contradictions of the great American project itself."
--Minal Hajratwala, author of Leaving India

About the Author

Vijay Prashad is director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, editor of LeftWord Books, and the chief correspondent for Globetrotter. He is the author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today, and co-author (with Noam Chomsky) of The Withdrawal (all published by The New Press), as well as Washington Bullets. The Darker Nations was chosen as a Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by the Asian American Writers' Workshop and won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize. He lives in Santiago, Chile, and Northampton, Massachusetts.