Providing a useful analysis of and framework for understanding immigration and assimilation narratives, anupama jain's" How to Be South Asian in America" considers the myth of the American Dream in fiction (Meena Alexander's "Manhattan Music"), film ("American Desi, American Chai"), and personal testimonies. By interrogating familiar American stories in the context of more supposedly exotic narratives, jain illuminates complexities of belonging that also reveal South Asians' anxieties about belonging, (trans)nationalism, and processes of cultural interpenetration.
jain argues that...