About the Book
Passport Photos a self-conscious act of artistic and intellectual forgery is a report on the immigrant condition. A multigenre book combining theory poetry cultural criticism and photography it explores the complexities of the immigration experience intervening in the impersonal language of the state. Passport Photos joins books by writers like Edward Said and Trinh T. Minh-ha in the search for a new poetics and politics of diaspora.
Organized as a passport Passport Photos is a unique work taking as its object of analysis and engagement the lived experience of post-coloniality--especially in the United States and India. The book is a collage moving back and forth between places historical moments voices and levels of analysis. Seeking to link cultural political and aesthetic critiques it weaves together issues as diverse as Indian fiction written in English signs put up by the border patrol at the U.S.-Tijuana border ethnic restaurants in New York City the history of Indian indenture in Trinidad Native Americans at the Superbowl and much more.
The borders this book crosses again and again are those where critical theory meets popular journalism and where political poetry encounters the work of documentary photography. The argument for such border crossings lies in the reality of people's lives. This thought-provoking book explores that reality as it brings postcolonial theory to a personal level and investigates global influences on local lives of immigrants.
Organized as a passport Passport Photos is a unique work taking as its object of analysis and engagement the lived experience of post-coloniality--especially in the United States and India. The book is a collage moving back and forth between places historical moments voices and levels of analysis. Seeking to link cultural political and aesthetic critiques it weaves together issues as diverse as Indian fiction written in English signs put up by the border patrol at the U.S.-Tijuana border ethnic restaurants in New York City the history of Indian indenture in Trinidad Native Americans at the Superbowl and much more.
The borders this book crosses again and again are those where critical theory meets popular journalism and where political poetry encounters the work of documentary photography. The argument for such border crossings lies in the reality of people's lives. This thought-provoking book explores that reality as it brings postcolonial theory to a personal level and investigates global influences on local lives of immigrants.