Bakirathi Mani: Current Research
Currently, I am completing a book manuscript: Becoming South Asian in America: National Identities, Transnational Localities. Focusing on aesthetic texts produced by first- and second-generation immigrants from the subcontinent, I examine the ways in which young immigrants become South Asian through pedagogy and performance.
Contemporary literature and film as well as visual and performance art are central sites for the ways in which South Asia is produced as myth, memory, and cultural practice in diaspora. As young immigrants produce, consume, and circulate these aesthetic texts, I argue that they become South Asian by embodying multiple narratives of national belonging.
Recent articles and reviews have been published in Diaspora, Positions, The Subcontinental, Amerasia Journal, Feminist Review and Journal of Asian Studies.
You can also listen to a selection from Becoming South Asian in America.
