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.

Tamara Bhalla blends a case study with literary and textual analysis to illuminate this phenomenon. Her fascinating 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, Bhalla questions how her subjects' circumstances, desires, and shared race and class, limit the values they ascribe to reading. She 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.
| Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. Mad for Difference: Authenticity, Ambivalence, and the Cosmopolitan South Asian American Reder 1. The Glue That Keeps Us Together: Constructing Ethnic Community in the NetSAP Book Club 2. There's a Whole Other Class: Model Minorities, Privileged Subjects, and the Question of Caste 3. A Narrow View of the World: Gendered Literary Culture and South Asian American Belonging 4. Thinking and Feeling with Her: Representation and Affect in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake Afterword. Beyond Ambivalence? Appendix 1. List of Interviewees Appendix 2. Book Club Meetings Attended (2006–2007, 2009–2010) Appendix 3. Complete List of Books Read by the NetSAP-DC Book Club, 1998–2014 Appendix 4. Interview Questions for NetSAP Book Club Interviewees Notes References Index | Bhalla offers a multi-layered, interdisciplinary treatment on the possibilities (and limitations) involved in both the act of reading and formation of ethnic identities. This thoughtful and thought-provoking book deserves its own reading club.—Pawan Dhingra, author of Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream
"Bhalla's nuanced, sensitive analysis illuminates how nonacademic readers grapple with issues of authenticity, class, and gender as they engage with transnational South Asian literature. This rigorously-researched book significantly enhances discussions of the consumption and marketing of ethnic literatures and identities."—Megan Sweeney, author of The Story Within Us: Women Prisoners Reflect on Reading
|Tamara Bhalla is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.