Temple University Press Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture (Asian American History & Culture)

In her insightful study, Fashioning Diaspora, Vanita Reddy carefully maps how transnational itineraries of Indian beauty and fashion shaped South Asian American cultural identities and racialized belonging from the 1990s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. She observes how diasporic subjects engage with and respond to various encounters with Indian beauty and fashion. One of the first books to consider beauty and fashion as a point of entry into an examination of South Asian diasporic public cultures, Fashioning Diaspora examines a range of literature, visual art, and live performance. Through careful analyses of novels by Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri, young adult literature, performance art by Shailja Patel, beauty and adornment practices, as well as objects of popular culture including an Indian American fashion doll, Reddy challenges fashion and beauty as a set of dematerialized, overly commodified cultural practices. She argues instead that beauty and fashion structure South Asian Americans' uneven access to social mobility, capital, and citizenship, and she demonstrates their varying capacities to produce social attachments across national, class, racial, gender, and generational divides. Review “Fashioning Diaspora is essential reading for scholarship on beauty. Reddy introduces a shift the field has long needed, as she reads beauty as embodied practice alongside cultural signifier; as produced within networks of social power and yet complicating them with its own disruptive logic. This is an analysis both critical and appreciative of its topic, and in its nuance a fine example of ‘why the humanities matter’ for making sense of neoliberal, transnational, material realities.”—erin Khuê Ninh, Associate Professor, Department of Asian American Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature “Fashioning Diaspora is an extraordinary intervention into the joint fields of Asian American studies and feminist and queer theory. Reddy makes important contributions, and her book is distinguished by fresh, original readings of a diverse archive of South Asian American public culture. This innovative constellation of texts not only enables us to see how the archive constitutes a historical source for narratives of South Asian migration but also produces a state of feeling: what she argues is the feeling of beauty.”—Bakirathi Mani, Associate Professor, Department of English Literature, Swarthmore College, and author of Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America “Vanita Reddy has now made it very difficult to think about the South Asian diaspora without paying attention to the subjects, objects, discourses, and practices of beauty that animate it. Moving seamlessly from discussions of the ‘exceptional beauty’ of literary heroines like Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine to the transformation of Delhi and Mumbai into new fashion capitals, Reddy’s compelling readings and vast archive of ‘beautiful forms’ leave us much wiser about how aesthetic desires and demands have shaped South Asians’ everyday practices of belonging.”—Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University, and author of The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion From the Author Vanita Reddy is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University. About the Author Vanita Reddy is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University.