American Karma: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Indian Diaspora »

Sunil Bhatia is Associate Professor of Human Development at Connecticut College.

The Indian American community is one of the fastest growing immigrant communities in the U.S. Unlike previous generations, they are marked by a high degree of training as medical doctors, engineers, scientists, and university professors.

American Karma draws on participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore how these highly skilled professionals have been inserted into the racial dynamics of American society and transformed into "people of color." Focusing on first-generation, middle-class Indians in American suburbia, it also sheds light on how these transnational immigrants themselves come to understand and negotiate their identities.

Bhatia forcefully contends that to fully understand migrant identity and cultural formation it is essential that psychologists and others think of selfhood as firmly intertwined with sociocultural factors such as colonialism, gender, language, immigration, and race-based immigration laws.

American Karma offers a new framework for thinking about the construction of selfhood and identity in the context of immigration. This innovative approach advances the field of psychology by incorporating critical issues related to the concept of culture, including race, power, and conflict, and will also provide key insights to those in anthropology, sociology, human development, and migrant studies.

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     1
American Karma: Race, Place, and Identity in the Indian Diaspora     12
Qualitative Inquiry and Psychology: Doing Ethnography in Transnational Cultures     42
Des-Pardes in the American Suburbia: Narratives from the Suburban Indian Diaspora     74
Saris, Chutney Sandwiches, and "Thick Accents": Constructing Difference     112
Racism and Glass Ceilings: Repositioning Difference     155
Analyzing Assignations and Assertions: The Enigma of Brown Privilege     184
Imagining Homes: Identity in Transnational Diasporas     220
Notes     235
Bibliography     243
Index     257
About the Author     271