Fantasy Syllabus

Useful Texts

The Karma of Brown Folk by Vijay Prashad (2000)
Prashad begins his one of a kind volume on the relationship between South Asian "success" and antiblack racism by inverting the question made famous by Dubois' The Souls of Black Folk . Instead of asking how it feels to a problem, Prashad inquires, "How does it feel to be a solution?" The book first unwraps how South Asians are culturally viewed on the American landscape (gurus for hippies, sources for corny uplift a la Deepak Chopra). Then Prashad unpacks how South Asians are weilded as a weapon against Black Americans. Held up as signals that racism is dead (stated explicitly by the atutional f The End of Racism , Dinesh D'Souza), South Asians are often used as a measure for Black success. This yardstick ignores the institional nature of racism in the US as well as the extent to which state selection dictates which prized immigrants enter when.

The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society by Dinesh D'Souza (1995)
It is telling that the major text written about South Asian immigrants and their relationship to the troubled Black community is a spectacular display of Right Wing philosophy. D'Souza employs the lens of South Asian material success to "illuminate" the failures of the Black American civilization. He posits that the plagues of violence, urban decay and poverty that wrack Black communities stem not from state sponsored racism bur rather from the decline of the Black civilization and, perhaps more outlandishly, their culture's inability or unwillingness to step up to the proverbial plate of modernity. Though loudly critiqued as lousy thinking on par with The Bell Curve , Prashad points out that D'Souza's arguments reveal a "hidden transcript that needs to be confronted rather than denied. Far more South Asian Americans than I wish to admit find merit in many of his arguments."

(Appalling) chapters on which to focus: the Preface which includes D'Souza's responses to the backlash of the initial print; Is America a Racist Society? The Problem of Rational Racism; Is Eurocentricism a Racist Concept? The Search for an African Shakespeare; The Content of Our Chromosomes: Race and the IQ Debate; Uncle Tom's Dilemna: Pathologies of Black Culture. The book does much, though unwittingly, to expose the necessary link between South Asians and antiblack racism, to illustrate how the South Asian love of white culture is inextricably related to its loathing of Black culture and finally how South Asian identity construction is necessarily influenced by Blacks, whites and how the former is evaluated by the latter.

White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness by Maurice Berger (1999).
This book is written in marvelously digestible chunks, many sections concise as two pages. The sections vary from personal narratives that describe the author's transformation from a racist young adult into a more socially aware thinker to excerpts from Baldiwn to survey responses to the question: Who is white? (Cubans are not, apparently). The book does much to ground in anecdotal evidence the onslaught of factual information provided by George Lipsitz' The Possessive Investment of Whiteness . He addresses lighter subjects such as hair texture as well as providing insight into the popularity of D'Souza's The End of Racism all while remaining at times astoundingly candid. Whether admitting he has "many friends who are racist" or relaying the rants about affirmative action and welfre recipients he spat as a young man, the book is unrelenting in its transparency and frankness.

The Possessive Investment of Whiteness by George Lipsitz (1998)
The first chapter of this book is as useful as the rest. Though at times tedious in its volume of detail, its argument is about as unrefutable as we postmodernists allow any claim to be. By methodically delineating how racism is structurally inherited and experienced by all race groups, Lipsitz provides an irreplaceable resource of, dare I say it, facts. Lipsitz painstakingly describes how property laws, environmental law, labor and union protocols, and urban renewal programs (to name a few) are designed to propagate the racial status quo.

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (1999)
This Pulitzer Prize winning collection of short stories is peopled by South Asians, some residing in India, some in the US (primarily in Boston with Ivy League ties) and a few traversing both scenes. Within its much admired pages, is a resounding absence of Black people. Though racism and immigrant identity construction is the subject of many of the immigrant stories, the context is invariably assimilation with or accommodation by whites. This book, and its inordinate success, is a good example of how South Asian literature explores racism through the inadequate binary of white-South Asian, and perhaps more tellingly, how South Asian writers are hesitant to unravel (by disclosing) the complexity of the racism experienced by, propelled by and exacted by South Asian immigrants.

"On Black Brown Relations" from Cornel West Reader by Cornel West (1996).
This double interview of professor Jorge de Alva and Cornel West first appeated in Harpers Magazine . In addition to the pleasure of witnessing two brilliant brains battling, their relevations provide first, a model of how to discuss race in the US outside of the Black-white binary and second, their conversation demonstrates how Black culture is indispensible to the concept of America and Americanness-- as evidenced by Alva's conclusion that Black Americans are "anglo." His (conflated?) equating of Black and American complicates race, culture and American identity in profound ways that relate directly to South Asian immigrant identity construction.