{"id":160,"date":"2004-08-09T19:01:55","date_gmt":"2004-08-10T00:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com?p=160"},"modified":"2005-01-14T00:48:17","modified_gmt":"2005-01-14T05:48:17","slug":"amardeep_breaks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/2004\/08\/09\/amardeep_breaks\/","title":{"rendered":"Amardeep breaks down &#8216;The Namesake&#8217; for you"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Amardeep Singh, prof at Lehigh University, finds an invisible man in Jhumpa Lahiri&#8217;s <i>The Namesake.<\/i> I normally wouldn&#8217;t point at a piece referencing Gayatri Spivak and other jargon-filled lit academics, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lehigh.edu\/~amsp\/2004\/07\/nameless-jhumpa-lahiris-namesake.html\">this was so worthy<\/a>.<br><br><\/p>\n\n<blockquote>\nFor Sikh men of course, the misnaming is much more aggressive: \u00c2\u201cOsama\u00c2\u201d and \u00c2\u201cBin Laden\u00c2\u201d are the most common mis-names one hears. One South Philly man (a caucasian), in a moment of inspired racist efficiency, recently referred to me simply as \u00c2\u201cBin,\u00c2\u201d thus saving himself the expenditure of five syllables he no doubt did not have to spare&#8230;\n<br><br>\n\u00c2\u201cJhumpa\u00c2\u201d is her pet name rather than her good name&#8230; Growing up in America, however, she has chosen it as her official, public name&#8230; Asserting the name \u00c2\u201cJhumpa\u00c2\u201d is at once a misnaming and a refusal to be misnamed&#8230; \n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p>And he dissects the lack of a handle for the desi community in the U.S., while those in the UK have long since usurped the term <i>Asian.<\/i><\/p>\n\n<blockquote>\n&#8230;desi may work, but it remains a name like a Punjabi or Bengali pet-name, a name used around the house rather than recognized by a broader public. In this case, there is a chance that the term will reach a critical mass, but it is not yet broadly available. I find it hard to imagine the word rolling off the tongue of someone like Charlie Rose&#8230;\n<br><br>\n\u00c2\u201cIndia\u00c2\u201d (like Calcutta and Delhi) is itself is an Anglicization of \u00c2\u201cal-Hind,\u00c2\u201d the Persian name for the area around the Indus River&#8230; What was India before it was misnamed? The confusion of the community-without-a-name is merely the latest extension of a permanent historical crisis in naming. \n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Amardeep Singh, prof at Lehigh University, finds an invisible man in Jhumpa Lahiri&#8217;s The Namesake. I normally wouldn&#8217;t point at a piece referencing Gayatri Spivak and other jargon-filled lit academics, but this was so worthy. For Sikh men of course, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/2004\/08\/09\/amardeep_breaks\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}