Passport Photos
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€33.99
A01=Amitava Kumar
Author_Amitava Kumar
Category=AJ
Category=JBFH
Category=JBSL
Category=JHM
complexities of immigration experience
critical theory meets popular journalism
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnic restaurants in new york city
impersonal language of state
india
indian fiction in english
lived experience of post coloniality
native americans at superbowl
organized as a passport
report on immigrant condition
signs at us and tijuana border
thought provoking
united states
Product details
- ISBN 9780520218178
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 14 Jun 2000
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Passport Photos, a self-conscious act of artistic and intellectual forgery, is a report on the immigrant condition. A multigenre book combining theory, poetry, cultural criticism, and photography, it explores the complexities of the immigration experience, intervening in the impersonal language of the state. Passport Photos joins books by writers like Edward Said and Trinh T. Minh-ha in the search for a new poetics and politics of diaspora. Organized as a passport, Passport Photos is a unique work, taking as its object of analysis and engagement the lived experience of post-coloniality--especially in the United States and India. The book is a collage, moving back and forth between places, historical moments, voices, and levels of analysis. Seeking to link cultural, political, and aesthetic critiques, it weaves together issues as diverse as Indian fiction written in English, signs put up by the border patrol at the U.S.-Tijuana border, ethnic restaurants in New York City, the history of Indian indenture in Trinidad, Native Americans at the Superbowl, and much more.
The borders this book crosses again and again are those where critical theory meets popular journalism, and where political poetry encounters the work of documentary photography. The argument for such border crossings lies in the reality of people's lives. This thought-provoking book explores that reality, as it brings postcolonial theory to a personal level and investigates global influences on local lives of immigrants.
Amitava Kumar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida, and has been a Fellow at Yale University. He is the editor of Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere (1997), and Poetics/Politics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom (1999). Kumar was the script-writer and narrator for the award-winning documentary film Pure Chutney (1998).
