A Patchwork Shawl

Read this moving book for the voices of South Asian women coming of age in America, telling of bodies and souls, sexual selves, the tug of generations, the struggles for social justice. - Meena Alexander (author of The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience) Powerful and unusual voices that break stereotypes and venture bravely into forbidden areas of South Asian womenÆs experience. - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (author of The Mistress of Spices) This is an important collection that will not only add to our empirical and theoretical understanding of the experiences of women of South Asian descent in the U.S., but corrects a deficiency in the growing literature on South Asian diasporas by putting issues of sexuality and domestic violence at the center of analysis. - Kamala Visweswaran (Univ. of Texas, author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography) Eminently readable, A Patchwork Shawl with its contemplation of gender in relation to personal memories and experience, collective imaginings of community and narratives of nationhood, is relevant to both the general reader and the scholar interested in issues of gender, national identity and diaspora studies. (National Identities) The strengths of the book are many. It offers strong and explicit essays on subjects often omitted or played down in work on South Asian Americans. The essays are clearly written and by a range of women, many of them non-academics who are activists in the South Asian community. Attractively produced, A Patchwork Shawl is sure to prove a stimulating text for Asian American and womenÆs studies courses. (Journal of American Ethnic History)