Duke University Press Transnational America

"Transnational America" is a path-breaking study of the production of middle-class Indian and American citizens in the context of late-twentieth-century neoliberalism. Inderpal Grewal considers how the circulation and travels of South Asian Indians between India and the U.S. during the 1990s created transnational subjects shaped by a global American culture. Rather than simply framing the United States as an imperialist nation-state that imposes unilateral political power in the world, Grewal analyzes how the concept of 'America' functions as a nationalist discourse beyond the boundaries of the United States by disseminating an ideal of democratic citizenship through consumer practices. Grewal combines a postcolonial perspective with social and cultural theory to argue that contemporary notions of gender, race, class, and nationality are linked to earlier histories of colonization and, in particular, to the consumer culture that emerged from colonization. Focusing on three novelists who emigrated from India to the United States, she considers how a concept of Americanness becomes linked to cosmopolitanism. Through an analysis of Mattel's sales of Barbie dolls in India, she shows how American products are consumed by middle-class Indian women with financial means created by India's market liberalization. Considering the fate of asylum-seekers, Grewal looks at how a global feminism in which female refugees are figured as human rights victims emerged from a Western subjectivity. In drawing attention to an 'America' created through the global circulation of people, goods, social movements, rights discourses and more, Grewal makes a powerful, nuanced argument that America must be understood - and studied - as a dynamic entity produced and transformed both within and far beyond its territorial boundaries. Review "Inderpal Grewal produces profound insights by bringing together disparate contemporary cultural, economic, and political phenomena within a single analytic framework, that of 'transnational America.' The acuity, gravity, and strenuous scholarship that mark her writing reflect the conviction that such an understanding is a crucial precondition for social transformation. This book is an important intervention by one of the foremost feminist postcolonial critics in the United States academy today."--Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, author of The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India "Inderpal Grewal deftly combines postcolonial, transnational, and feminist approaches to the study of neoliberalism and consumerism in this timely and important book. The challenges it raises for area studies and disciplinary formations are sure to excite argument and debate in many different quarters."--Akhil Gupta, author of Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India "Grosz offers an alternative to the socially constructed identity and sexualities by calling for an examination of how inhuman forces constitute them."--Catherine Villanueva Gardner, American Philosophical Association Newsletter "In its drive towards the future - a future seen as radically open and indeterminable - Grosz's work provides a positive and invigorating vision of the role of cultural theory. It also offers a compelling re-envisioning of the present, and the present's relationship to the future. The structure of the book, as a collection of connected but disparate essays, means that it does not, and does not attempt to, develop a totalising theory of temporality. Rather, it opens up new directions both in how we think about theory and the consequences - and futures - of cultural and feminist theory." --Karen Hall, Limina "Grewal s book is an important contribution to the discussion of transnational construction of identities in the framework of neoliberal cosmopolitanism. It uses multiple contexts to explore the ways in which this hypothetically a-national formation works for especiall