Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America

Responsibility: Vivek Bald.
Imprint: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2013.
Physical description: x, 294 p., [11] p. of plates : ill., maps ; 25 cm.

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Call number	Note	Status
E184 .S69 B35 2013		Unknown

Description

Creators/Contributors

Author/Creator: Bald, Vivek.

Contents/Summary

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction : lost in migration
Out of the East and into the South
Between "Hindoo" and "Negro"
From ships' holds to factory floors
The travels and transformations of Amir Haider Khan
Bengali Harlem
The life and times of a multiracial community
Conclusion : lost futures.

Publisher's summary

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 Treme 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.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Publisher's summary

Nineteenth-century Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their villages in Bengal. Demand for "Oriental goods" took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey's boardwalks into the segregated South. Bald's history reveals cross-racial affinities below the surface of early twentieth-century America.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)