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A Patchwork Shawl
Chronicle of South Asian Women In America
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A Patchwork Shawl
Chronicle of South Asian Women In America

Edited By Shamita Das Dasgupta
1998, 239 pages, paperback.
Book Description from Back Cover
Comments from Back Cover
List of Authors and Background on the Editor

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Book Description from Back Cover

A Patchwork Shawl is a collection of essays by and about South Asian women in America. Some were born here, others came as children or adults; all are deeply rooted in the cultures of their countries of origin: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, or Sri Lanka. All grapple with the dilemma of the clash between traditional and modern society, between patriachal structures, transposed and resurrected in a new world, and women's emerging resistance to their constraints.

A Patchwork Shawl challenges commonly held stereotypes about the South Asian immigrant community. It opens a frank discussion of taboos that have long surrounded sexuality, domestic violence, and intimacy, and poses the possibility for women to re-negiotate identity and to organize communal self-help networks. In the introduction, Shamita Das Dasgupta, a pioneer activist against domestic violence, lays out the psychological topography of the South Asian community and each essay brings a new, unique perspective to the intersection of gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and class.

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Comments from Back Cover

"Powerful and unusual voices that break stereotypes and venture bravely into forbidden areas of South Asian women's experience."
-Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of The Mistress of Spices

"Read this moving book for the voices of South Asian women coming of age in America, telling of bodies and souls, sexual selves, the tug of generations, the struggles for social justice."
-Meena Alexander, author of The Shock ofArrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience

"This is an important collection that will not only add to our empirical and theoretical understanding of the experiences of women of South Asian descent in the U.S., but corrects a deficiency in the growing literature on South Asian diasporas by putting issues of sexuality and domestic violence at the center of analysis."
-Kamala Visweswaran, author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography

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List of Authors and Background on Shamita Das Dasgupta

Contributors include Malahat Baig Amin, Anannya Bhattacharjee, Lubna Chaudhry, Sayantani DasGupta, Nabila El-Bassel, Louisa Gilbert, Naheed Hasnat, Naheed Islam, Surina Khan, Satya Krishnan, Rinita Mazumdar, Sunita Sunder Mukhi, Grace Poore, Manisha Roy, Sonia Shah and Anne Waters.

Shamita Das Dasgupta is an assistant professor in psychology at Rutgers University, Newark, and author of The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales. She is a cofounder of Manavi, the first organization dedicated to combatting domestic violence against South Asian women in the United States.

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