Where Are You From? Middle-Class Migrants in the Modern World

by Dhooleka S. Raj

Dhooleka S. Raj explores the complexities of ethnic minority cultural change in this incisive examination of first- and second-generation middle-class South Asian families living in London. Challenging prevalent understandings of ethnicity that equate community, culture, and identity, Raj considers how transnational ethnic minorities are circumscribed by nostalgia for culture.

Where Are You From? argues that the nostalgia for culture obscures the complexities of change in migrant minority lives and limits the ways the politics of diversity can be imagined by the nation. Based on ethnographic research with Indian migrants and their children, this book examines how categories of identity, culture, community, and nation are negotiated and often equated.

296 pages, Hardcover

First published June 2, 2003

Reviews

[Jack]

A good, clear book on a very relevant topic.

[Anjali]

Useful for literature reviews for my academic work, also an entertaining read. I liked the anthropologist perspective on cross cultural dynamics.