The United States of India

Anticolonial Literature and Transnational Refraction

Manan Desai
Book Cover

PB: $34.95
EAN: 978-1-4399-1890-6
Publication: Mar 20

HC: $99.50
EAN: 978-1-4399-1889-0
Publication: Mar 20

Ebook: $34.95
EAN: 978-1-4399-1891-3
Publication: Mar 20

264 pages
6 x 9
13 halftones

Examines a network of intellectuals who attempted to reimagine and reshape the relationship between the U.S. and India

Read a blog entry by the author

Read the Introduction (pdf).

Description

The United States of India shows how Indian and American writers in the United States played a key role in the development of anticolonial thought in the years during and immediately following the First World War. For Indians Lajpat Rai and Dhan Gopal Mukerji, and Americans Agnes Smedley, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Katherine Mayo, the social and historical landscape of America and India acted as a reflective surface. Manan Desai considers how their interactions provided a “transnational refraction”—a political optic and discursive strategy that offered ways to imagine how American history could shed light on an anticolonial Indian future.

Desai traces how various expatriate and immigrant Indians formed political movements that rallied for American support for the cause of Indian independence. These intellectuals also developed new forms of writing about subjugation in the U.S. and India. Providing an examination of race, caste, nationhood, and empire, Desai astutely examines this network of Indian and American writers and the genres and social questions that fomented solidarity across borders.

Reviews

"In this era, Desai's...book (is) not just (an) inadvertently timely intervention in the sociology of race, but also in academia more generally. (It) show(s) the necessity that our work is engaged with the world we are studying, in the hope that we can collectively make a better world for all."
— Ethnicities

“ A fascinating study, at once rigorously theoretical and appealingly anecdotal, that adds to and reshapes the growing field of South Asian American Studies. Cogent and well-organized, The United States of India exhibits a truly interdisciplinary scope, encompassing insights from literary studies, visual culture, legal history, and postcolonial theory.”—Dohra Ahmad, Professor of English at St. John’s University and editor of The Penguin Book of Migration Literature

“ Manan Desai has written a much needed textual analysis of some of the seminal texts of early South Asian American history. An important contribution that asks us to consider how America’s promises and limitations can be revealed and interrogated through the anticolonial struggles that animated this historical period.”—Seema Sohi, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: An Indian in Washington
1. Race across Empires: Lajpat Rai’s The United States of America
2. The Indian Plot: Agnes Smedley and American Anticolonialism
3. Killing Kipling: Dhan Gopal Mukerji and America’s India
4. The Dark Alliance: Refracting India in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess
5. Uncle Sham: Katherine Mayo’s Mother India and Parodic Anti-imperialism
Afterword: Refracting the Past

Notes
Index

About the Author(s)

Manan Desai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Culture and the Program in Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan. He serves on the Academic Council of the South Asian American Digital Archive.


Subjects

Asian American Studies Literature and Drama Immigration

In the Series

  • Asian American History and Culture edited by Cathy Schlund-Vials, Rick Bonus, and Shelley Sang-Hee Lee

    Founded by Sucheng Chan in 1991, the Asian American History and Culture series has sponsored innovative scholarship that has redefined, expanded, and advanced the field of Asian American studies while strengthening its links to related areas of scholarly inquiry and engaged critique. Like the field from which it emerged, the series remains rooted in the social sciences and humanities, encompassing multiple regions, formations, communities, and identities. Extending the vision of founding editor Sucheng Chan and emeriti editor Michael Omi, David Palumbo-Liu, K. Scott Wong and Linda Trinh Võ, series editors Cathy Schlund-Vials, Rick Bonus, and Shelley Sang-Hee Lee continue to develop a foundational collection that embodies a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to Asian American studies.