Subtitle: Chronicles of South Asian Women in America
Editor: Shamita Das Dasgupta
Subject: Asian American Studies
Paperback ISBN 0-8135-2518-7
Pages: 256 pp.
Description: Feminist scholarship combines with personal narrative to address concerns and debates in South Asian communities in the U.S.

"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, Univ. of Texas, author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography

A Patchwork Shawl sheds light on the lives of a segment of the U.S. immigrant population that has long been relegated to the margins. It focuses on women's lives that span different worlds: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and the United States. This collection of essays by and about South Asian women in America challenges stereotypes by allowing women to speak in their own words. Together they provide discerning insights into the reconstruction of immigrant patriarchy in a new world, and the development of women's resistance to that reconstruction. Shamita Das DasGupta's introduction also acquaints readers with the psychological topography of the South Asian community.

A Patchwork Shawl considers topics from re-negotiation of identity to sexuality, violence to intimacy, occupations to organizing within the community. The essays bear witness to women's negotiations for independent identities, their claim to their own bodies, and the right to choose relationships based on their own histories and truths. They bring new understanding to the intersection of gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and class.

Contributors include Sonia Shah, Anannya Bhattacharjee, Manisha Roy, Surina Khan, gracepoore, Sayantani DasGupta, Naheed Islam, Rinita Mazumdar, Lubna Chaudhry, Satya Krishnan, Malahat Baig Amin, Sunita Sunder Mukhi, and Naheed Hasnat.

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 also a cofounder of Manavi, the first organization in the U.S. to focus on violence against South Asian women in the U.S.