Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States (Asian American Experience)

Synopsis

In Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States, Mahavi Mallapragada analyzes home pages and other online communities organized by diasporic and immigrant Indians from the late 1990s through the social media period. Engaging the shifting aspects of belonging, immigrant politics, and cultural citizenship by linking the home page, household, and homeland as key sites, Mallapragada illuminates the contours of belonging and reveals how Indian American struggles over it trace back to the web's active mediation in representing, negotiating, and reimagining home. As Mallapragada shows, ideologies around family and citizenship shift to fit the transnational contexts of the online world and immigration. At the same time, the tactical use of the home page to make gender, racial, and class struggles visible and create new modes for belonging implicates the web within complex political and cultural terrain. On e-commerce, community, and activist sites, the recasting of home and homeland online points to intrusion by public agents such as the state, the law, and immigration systems in the domestic, the private, and the familial. Mallapragada reveals that the home page may mobilize to reproduce conservative narratives of Indian immigrants' familial and citizenship cultures, but the reach of a website extends beyond the textual and discursive to encompass the institutions shaping it, as the web unmakes and remakes ideas of India and America.--Page 4 of cover. Introduction : recasting home -- Homepage nationalisms : Silicon Indians and curry codes -- Out of place in the domestic space : H4 Indian ladies negotiating belonging -- The wired home : commodified belonging for the transnational family -- Desi networks : linking race, class, and immigration to homeland -- Conclusion : home matters in the age of networks. Madhavi Mallapragada. Includes bibliographical references and index.