Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms

"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"

In "Transnational America," Inderpal Grewal examines how the circulation of people, goods, social movements, and rights discourses during the 1990s created transnational subjects shaped by a global American culture. Rather than simply frame 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. She develops her argument by focusing on South Asians in India and the United States.
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. Through an analysis of Mattel's sales of Barbie dolls in India, she discusses the consumption of American products by middle-class Indian women newly empowered 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 distinctly Western perspective. She reveals in the work of three novelists who emigrated from India to the United States--Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Amitav Ghosh--a concept of Americanness linked to cosmopolitanism. In "Transnational America" Grewal makes a powerful, nuanced case that the United States must be understood--and studied--as a dynamic entity produced and transformed both within and far beyond its territorial boundaries.