Many scholars of immigration and diasporic studies have explored the question of how South Asians have settled and formed communities in North America. As a result, any new monograph on South Asian Americans shoulders the onerous responsibility of justifying its presence in an already crowded subfield. In Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World (2020), Tahseen Shams (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto) compels readers to stop and wonder why a book like this one was not written earlier. Written over the course of five years, the title under review equips readers with innovative ways to interpret and theorize the lived experiences of the community that is central to its analysis—South Asian American Muslims—in the post 9/11 period. As such, transposing its findings to other transnationally sited social formations may also generate profitable yields.
The key contribution of this work is...
University of California Press