NOT QUITE NOT WHITE

A memoir manifesto about race, immigration, and assimilation; how an Indian American woman navigated through her journey into the heart of "not whiteness" to share a nuanced narrative of what it's like to experience race in the US and how that informs the meaning of being American.

When Sen emigrated from India to the U.S. in 1982 at the age of 12, she was asked to "self-report" her race. Never identifying with a race previously, she rejects her new "not quite white" designation, and spends much of her life attempting to become "white" in the American sense. After her teen years trying to adapt to American culture, including watching General Hospital and The Jeffersons and perfecting recipes with Campbell's soup or Jell-O, Sen is forced to reckon with hard questions: what does it mean to be "white," who is allowed to be white, why does whiteness retain the power of invisibility while other colors are made hypervisible, and how much does whiteness figure into Americanness? Exploring hot-button topics such as passing, cultural appropriation, class inequality, bias within Indian immigrant communities, and code-switching, Sen offers new angles to the debate on race and immigration with emotional honesty, humor, and thoughtful criticism. Sen discovers her eventual acceptance of her "not whiteness" is actually what makes her American, and as a mother of three not white American children, looking at their own possible future, Sen brings the reader to imagine how America might, by the end of the century, end up being defined outside its borders, in a new diaspora.

NOT QUITE NOT WHITE is for readers of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Eric Liu, Maggie Nelson and Moustafa Boyoumi. It's about time that there is an Asian American viewpoint on race in the USA, and Sharmila Sen is the person to write this book. She begins with discussing race issues on college campuses and delivers a mix of autobiography and criticism that is illuminated by her literary and historical references.

Sharmila Sen grew up in Calcutta, India, and immigrated to the United States when she was twelve. She was educated in the public schools of Cambridge, Mass., received her AB in English literature from Harvard and her PhD in English from Yale. As an assistant professor at Harvard she taught courses on literatures from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean for seven years. Currently, she is executive editor-at-large at Harvard University Press. Sharmila has lived and worked in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. She has lectured around the world on postcolonial literature and culture and published essays on racism and immigration. Sharmila resides in Cambridge, Mass., with her architect husband and their three children.