by Sayantani Dasgupta
University of North Carolina Press
10/1/2024, paperback
SKU: 9781469681771
As a child growing up in New Delhi, Sayantani Dasgupta wanted to go on adventures involving shipwrecks and treasure chests. Her parents wanted her to stay in school instead. She satisfied her curiosity by drawing maps, inventing languages with friends, and reading everything: English adventures, Russian folktales, Hindi comics, Bengali ghost stories.
Brown Women Have Everything embraces the same spirit of wonder as we follow Dasgupta, now living and teaching in the United States, to cathedrals in Italy, pirate graveyards in North Carolina, hair salons in Idaho, her aunt's kitchen in Bangladesh, graffiti-lined streets of Colombia, the hierarchical world of academia, and her marriage to a handsome Sikh. As she moves through the world, she examines issues of the body, violence, travel, and belonging with a mix of humor, joy, pride, and outrage. While the eighteen interwoven essays in this collection call out bigotry, bias, and othering, they ultimately celebrate the ties that bind our disparate, global lives together.
Reviews:
"Witty, thoughtful reading . . . . As she explores issues of race, culture, and gender, Dasgupta's lively, intelligent book celebrates the "honor and dignity" of embracing the discomforts of the transnational life, which offers the unexpected rewards and delights of the unfamiliar."--Kirkus Reviews
"Dasgupta encounters and offers up for consideration issues such as privilege, racism, the intellectual and emotional facets of multilingualism, the exoticising of another culture (hers, for instance), and guns in America."--Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
"Essay collections by people of color are hard to find; those from a non-Western perspective are even rarer. Dasgupta offers both and reinvents herself with each essay, making this book a gem."--Ira Sukrungruang, author of This Jade World
About the Author:
Sayantani Dasgupta is associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.