Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States

by Madhavi Mallapragada

Overview

The internet has transformed the idea of home for Indians and Indian Americans. In Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States, Madhavi 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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252038631
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	08/04/2013
Series:	Asian American Experience
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Madhavi Mallapragada is an assistant professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas.

Table of Contents

List of Illustration vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Recasting Home 1

1 Homepage Nationalisms: Silicon Indians and Curry Codes 21

2 Out of Place in the Domestic Space: H4 Indian Ladies Negotiating Belonging 46

3 The Wired Home: Commodified Belonging for the Transnational Family 82

4 Desi Networks: Linking Race, Class, and Immigration to Homeland 115

Conclusion: Home Matters in the Age of Networks 143

Notes 153

Index 181

Editorial Reviews

"Gives the reader unique and detailed information about Indian and Indian American internet culture and public discourses about technology and transnationality during the birth of the World Wide Web. . . . The sections on Indian immigration and the technology industry and culture will be fascinating to scholars in digital media studies as well as scholars in Asian and Asian American studies. I can't think of a single other book that covers this territory."
—Lisa Nakamura, author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet

From the Publisher