Often thought of as a solitary activity, the practice of reading can in fact encode the complex politics of community formation. Engagement with literary culture represents a particularly integral facet of identity formation—and expresses of a sense of belonging—within the South Asian diaspora in the United States. This book blends a case study with literary and textual analysis to illuminate this phenomenon. The book's investigation considers institutions from literary reviews to the marketplace to social media and other technologies, as well as traditional forms of literary discussion like b ... More

Often thought of as a solitary activity, the practice of reading can in fact encode the complex politics of community formation. Engagement with literary culture represents a particularly integral facet of identity formation—and expresses of a sense of belonging—within the South Asian diaspora in the United States. This book blends a case study with literary and textual analysis to illuminate this phenomenon. The book's investigation considers institutions from literary reviews to the marketplace to social media and other technologies, as well as traditional forms of literary discussion like book clubs and academic criticism. Throughout the book questions how its subjects' circumstances, desires, and shared race and class, limit the values they ascribe to reading. It also examines how ideology circulating around a body of literature or a self-selected, imagined community of readers shapes reading itself and influences South Asians' powerful, if contradictory, relationship with ideals of cultural authenticity.