Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community by Tamara Bhalla (review)

Literary studies, like much of the world, seems defined for the moment by its attention to borders and border-crossings, often geographic ones, but many other types as well. Once the terrain of ethnic American and diasporic literary studies, the language of borders and border crossings has become increasingly relevant to our conversations about literature and literary culture. This development should not be all that surprising. Even as it becomes more difficult for physical bodies to move across borders, technology has markedly increased transnational movement of just about everything else, including literary texts, our ideas about them, and our study of their reception. While Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community has been fifteen years in the making according to author Tamara Bhalla, it comes along at just the right time to have a voice in shaping our current conversations about literature under transnationalism in the twentieth-first century.

Taking shape as four slim chapters and an introduction, the book examines the reading practices of the Network of South Asian Professionals (NetSAP) book club of Washington, D.C., alongside the discourses within literary institutions about transnational South Asian literature, particularly the preoccupations of the scholars, critics, and authors shaping the canon of this specific body of literature. Bhalla helpfully situates this examination within theoretical discussions of reading and argues for an approach to understanding the act of reading that accounts for the interactions among individual acts of reading, communal discussions, and institutional discourses. While Bhalla does not exactly argue the point, literary studies in general could benefit from more scholarship attentive to the porous boundaries between lay readers and professional readers within the literary establishment.

Bhalla also positions her examination of NetSAP and the South Asian literature the club reads within South Asian American studies, particularly in its attention to how second- and third-generation South Asian Americans negotiate and validate their belonging in the United States, and within its broader discussions of the role literary culture plays in the formation of multicultural identity. The first of these contexts provides Bhalla with the analytical framework for her study of this particular group of readers: namely, the role of ambivalence in structuring not only identity but also the reading practices of those negotiating cultural boundaries. The practice of reading, Bhalla demonstrates, has become central to how the members of NetSAP understand themselves as multicultural citizens and how they establish and reinforce a sense of belonging in the United State.

The book begins with a broad discussion of the theme of authenticity in South Asian American identity and culture formation within the United States, including literary production, and the particularities—and sometimes even peculiarities—of the cosmopolitan membership of the NetSAP book club, both of which the author situates within the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. The word peculiarities seems appropriate here because, as Bhalla points out, the characteristics of NetSAP set it apart from general book clubs insofar as its membership forms explicitly and intentionally around the ethnic and professional identities of its readers. Through both their identities as South Asian Americans and their privilege as members of the professional upper-middle class, the readers Bhalla studies are in some ways as transnational as the texts they read. As mostly second-generation South Asian Americans, they circulate between families and communities here in the U.S. and in their families’ countries of origins with general economic ease, but the ease with which they do so is often belied by the ambivalence that appears to come with moving between two different communities that, while threaded together by ethnic identity, feel worlds apart in other ways. According to Bhalla, reading South Asian American literature becomes for them a key site for reflecting upon their movements between communities and for understanding the state of their ambivalence.

The readers of the NetSAP book club are represented through Bhalla’s ethnographic research and participatory observation, as well as...