Brown Women Have Everything: Essays on (Dis)comfort and Delight

by Sayantani Dasgupta

Overview

As a child growing up in New Delhi, Sayantani Dasgupta wanted to go on adventures involving shipwrecks and treasure chests. Her parents wanted her to stay in school instead. She satisfied her curiosity by drawing maps, inventing languages with friends, and reading everything: English adventures, Russian folktales, Hindi comics, Bengali ghost stories.

Brown Women Have Everything embraces the same spirit of wonder as we follow Dasgupta, now living and teaching in the United States, to cathedrals in Italy, pirate graveyards in North Carolina, hair salons in Idaho, her aunt’s kitchen in Bangladesh, graffiti-lined streets of Colombia, the hierarchical world of academia, and her marriage to a handsome Sikh. As she moves through the world, she examines issues of the body, violence, travel, and belonging with a mix of humor, joy, pride, and outrage. While the eighteen interwoven essays in this collection call out bigotry, bias, and othering, they ultimately celebrate the ties that bind our disparate, global lives together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469681771
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	10/01/2024
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Sayantani Dasgupta is associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“In this clear-eyed, witty, and vivid collection, Dasgupta wields levity and tenderness, an equally sharp mind and tongue, and an eye for memorable detail. I would follow her anywhere.”—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism

“Essay collections by people of color are hard to find; those from a non-Western perspective are even rarer. Dasgupta offers both and reinvents herself with each essay, making this book a gem.”—Ira Sukrungruang, author of This Jade World

“Sayantani Dasgupta seems to have everything: a line to the best coffee shop, her mother’s perfect tomato chutney recipe, a great job teaching creative writing, and the heart of a grand adventurer. She also has the confidence and open gaze of someone comfortable in her own skin, and most importantly, great hair. Yet as a brown woman, she has even more: folks who suggest she has her job because of her skin color; catcalls from men on the street; white stylists who can’t make sense of her curls. Through all her experiences, Dasgupta writes into the deep meaning that flashes like a fish below the surface of any interaction, no matter how superficial. These essays meet different encounters and opinions with open-mindedness, grace, and curiosity; and a sharp sense of humor runs through each page. After all, as Dasgupta writes with her characteristic flair, 'underneath our suits, we are all a little beastly.'”—Katie Farris, author of Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize

“These essays hold treasure troves of delicacies, charms, and hard-earned or inherited wisdom. Brown Women Have Everything made me laugh, think, and revel in the splendor of the world.”—Toni Jensen, author of Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land

“An intrepid writer and traveler with a sly, delicious wit, Sayantani Dasgupta marries memory and nostalgia with sharp observations about what it takes to make a place home.”—Sejal Shah, author of How to Make Your Mother Cry: Fictions

Editorial Reviews

"Witty, thoughtful reading . . . . As she explores issues of race, culture, and gender, Dasgupta’s lively, intelligent book celebrates the “honor and dignity” of embracing the discomforts of the transnational life, which offers the unexpected rewards and delights of the unfamiliar.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Perceptive and personal . . . . Dasgupta has a talent for finding the profound in the everyday.”—Publishers Weekly

“Taken together, the titles of [Dasgupta’s] essay and story collection arrive at something bigger. . . . Dasgupta’s stories and essays show what women have and haven’t had, in India and the US, in reality and representation, in present and past generations. And Dasgupta has the ability to hold all of these in her arms at once—many dialectics—and make them clear to us, lining them up in tidy rows of words on pages in a book of essays for others to hold as well.”—North Carolina Literary Review

“Dasgupta encounters and offers up for consideration issues such as privilege, racism, the intellectual and emotional facets of multilingualism, the exoticising of another culture (hers, for instance), and guns in America.”—Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

“What does it mean to look at the world with curiosity? Sayantani Dasgupta’s new collection exemplifies and redefines this question . . . . Brown Women Have Everything leaves no stone unturned as it weaves together historical milestones, an inspection of family heritage, and sharp insights into the workings of interpersonal relationships . . . . What distinguishes Dasgupta from other essayists is her capacity to balance reverence for joyous and vibrant moments with a sense of discomfort that permeates the collection . . . . Multiple bouts of discomfort ultimately transform into delight.”—Barrelhouse

“In this clear-eyed, witty, and vivid collection, Dasgupta wields levity and tenderness, an equally sharp mind and tongue, and an eye for memorable detail. I would follow her anywhere.”—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism

“Essay collections by people of color are hard to find; those from a non-Western perspective are even rarer. Dasgupta offers both and reinvents herself with each essay, making this book a gem.”—Ira Sukrungruang, author of This Jade World

“Sayantani Dasgupta seems to have everything: a line to the best coffee shop, her mother’s perfect tomato chutney recipe, a great job teaching creative writing, and the heart of a grand adventurer. She also has the confidence and open gaze of someone comfortable in her own skin, and most importantly, great hair. Yet as a brown woman, she has even more: folks who suggest she has her job because of her skin color; catcalls from men on the street; white stylists who can’t make sense of her curls. Through all her experiences, Dasgupta writes into the deep meaning that flashes like a fish below the surface of any interaction, no matter how superficial. These essays meet different encounters and opinions with open-mindedness, grace, and curiosity; and a sharp sense of humor runs through each page. After all, as Dasgupta writes with her characteristic flair, 'underneath our suits, we are all a little beastly.'”—Katie Farris, author of Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize

“These essays hold treasure troves of delicacies, charms, and hard-earned or inherited wisdom. Brown Women Have Everything made me laugh, think, and revel in the splendor of the world.”—Toni Jensen, author of Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land

“An intrepid writer and traveler with a sly, delicious wit, Sayantani Dasgupta marries memory and nostalgia with sharp observations about what it takes to make a place home.”—Sejal Shah, author of How to Make Your Mother Cry: Fictions

From the Publisher

2024-08-17
Reflections on being a Southeast Asian immigrant woman in America and on the meaning of finding—and making—a home in the West.

Dasgupta, now a UNC-Wilmington professor of creative writing, became entranced by the world outside India after reading Jules Verne’sTwenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as a 9-year-old in New Delhi, never imagining that her love of words would lead her to the United States. In this compendium of 18 essays, the author muses on the peripatetic path that took her from the heat and crowds of New Delhi to an MFA writing program in rural Idaho in 2006 and, later, to a job on the North Carolina coast. Her first challenge was navigating majority-white spaces that, while not overtly hostile, made her uncomfortably aware of her foreignness. Despite feeling excluded, alone, and homesick for India, Dasgupta found a way forward through friendships, marriage to an Indian American Sikh, and a life that, like the Modcloth dress she wore as a wedding gown, defied the Hindu traditions in which she had been raised. When she eventually left to take up a professorship 2,800 miles away, the author surprised herself by feeling “constantly homesick” for Idaho. As had been the case in graduate school, her job made Dasgupta feel the singularity of her status as a brown-skinned female professional among white Americans. At the same time, it also offered her the chance to indulge her passion for adventure while making her crave reconnection to India, which she found by cooking the foods of her childhood. As she explores issues of race, culture, and gender, Dasgupta's lively, intelligent book celebrates the “honor and dignity” of embracing the discomforts of the transnational life, which offers the unexpected rewards and delights of the unfamiliar.

Witty, thoughtful reading.

Kirkus Reviews