Discusses the South Asian community in America including the history of political activism, an analysis of the shifting ideas of culture, and examines the wave of violence the community experienced right after September 11.

Village Voice Favorite Books of 2000 The popular book challenging the idea of a model minority, now in paperback! “How does it feel to be a problem?” asked W. E. B. Du Bois of black Americans in his classic The Souls of Black Folk. A hundred years later, Vijay Prashad asks South Asians “How does it feel to be a solution?” In this kaleidoscopic critique, Prashad looks into the complexities faced by the members of a “model minority”-one, he claims, that is consistently deployed as "a weapon in the war against black America." On a vast canvas, The Karma of Brown Folk attacks the two pillars of the “model minority” image, that South Asians are both inherently successful and pliant, and analyzes the ways in which U.S. immigration policy and American Orientalism have perpetuated these stereotypes. Prashad uses irony, humor, razor-sharp criticism, personal reflections, and historical research to challenge the arguments made by Dinesh D’Souza, who heralds South Asian success in the U.S., and to question the quiet accommodation to racism made by many South Asians. A look at Deepak Chopra and others whom Prashad terms “Godmen” shows us how some South Asians exploit the stereotype of inherent spirituality, much to the chagrin of other South Asians. Following the long engagement of American culture with South Asia, Prashad traces India’s effect on thinkers like Cotton Mather and Henry David Thoreau, Ravi Shankar’s influence on John Coltrane, and such essential issues as race versus caste and the connection between antiracism activism and anticolonial resistance. The Karma of Brown Folk locates the birth of the “model minority” myth, placing it firmly in the context of reaction to the struggle for Black Liberation. Prashad reclaims the long history of black and South Asian solidarity, discussing joint struggles in the U.S., the Caribbean, South Africa, and elsewhere, and exposes how these powerful moments of alliance faded from historical memory and were replaced by Indian support for antiblack racism. Ultimately, Prashad writes not just about South Asians in America but about America itself, in the tradition of Tocqueville, Du Bois, Richard Wright, and others. He explores the place of collective struggle and multiracial alliances in the transformation of self and community-in short, how Americans define themselves.

The landmark alternative history of the Cold War from the perspective of the Global South, reissued in paperback with a new introduction by the author In this award-winning investigation into the overlooked history of the Third World—with a new preface by the author for its fifteenth anniversary—internationally renowned historian Vijay Prashad conjures what Publishers Weekly calls “a vital assertion of an alternative future.” The Darker Nations, praised by critics as a welcome antidote to apologists for empire, has defined for a generation of scholars, activists, and dreamers what it is to imagine a more just international order and continues to offer lessons for the radical political projects of today. With the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the rise of India and China on the global scene, this paradigm-shifting book of groundbreaking scholarship helps us envision the future of the Global South by restoring to memory the vibrant though flawed idea of the Third World whose demise, Prashad ultimately argues, has produced an impoverished and asymmetrical international political arena. No other book on the Third World—as a utopian idea and a global movement—can speak so effectively and engagingly to our troubled times.

Swami Gambhirananda (1899 - 1988), a noted Hindu monk, was the eleventh President of the worldwide monastic-philanthropic order of the Ramakrishna Mission, better known in the West as the Vedanta Society. He was a prolific scholar and a spiritual teacher and an indefatigable leader. But these only describe the visible man. His inner life was one of calm and continuous meditation. It has been said that most of the time he was carrying on a mental conversation with the spiritual masters whose lives he had chronicled. A fellow monk has said: "If you want to get close to a real holy man, you try to get close to Swami Gambhirananda."But this is not a story of the Swami as a lone journeyer. It is about him in a group of pilgrims walking towards light: Everyday men and women in their everyday grind; sadhus and sadhvis; and some few persons of note. Here are then modern-day stories of soarings of the human mind as old as man himself: Spirituality.

Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for History A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A Saveur “Essential Food Books That Define New York City” Selection In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women. As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.

"A collection of true stories designed to help parents teach morals to their children and to show parents how to have a happier home. Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories are intended for parents to read to their children at bedtime or for family worship. This world-reknown best-selling classic has been a favorite of children and parents for generations."--Amazon.com.

‘As I grow older’, said Swami Vivekananda, ‘I find that I look more and more for greatness in little things. I want to know what a great man eats and wears, and how he speaks to his servants [and so on].’ This book presents an intimate picture of Revered Swami Yatiswarananda Maharaj, one such spiritually great man in the Order of Monks founded by Swami Vivekananda—the Ramakrishna Order (popularly known as Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission). This volume does this by putting together the reminiscences of monks, initiated lay devotees or even casual visitors or people who heard his lectures as well as some of the personal letters and instructions he wrote or gave and other related material.