""Class Issues" reminds us that university intellectuals work in knowledge factories; that the factories produce engines of dominance; and that, therfore, sabotage has to be the order of the day. The essays state their cases with elegance, with thoroughness, and with economical precision. No one interested in addressing his or her mite of effort to transforming the world can afford to ingore this book."
--Wahneema Lubiano
Duke University

The university classroom has been turned into an intensely bitter battlefield. Conservatives are attacking the academy's ability to teach, and at times its very right to educate. As the dust begins to settle, the contributors to this volume weigh in with a constructive and wide-ranging statement on the progressive possibilities of teaching. This is, in many ways, a book for the morning after the PC Wars, when the shouting dies down and the imperatives of pedagogy remain.

Asserting a complex, inter-related agenda for teachers and students, "Class Issues" is an anthology of essays on radical teaching. Leading scholars of literary and cultural studies, queer studies, ethnic studies and working-class literature examine the challenges that confront progressive pedagogy, as well as the histories that lie behind the achievements of cultural studies. "Class Issues" offers a plan for the construction of an alternative public sphere in the rapidly changing space of the classroom in the academy.

"Class Issues" is a compilation of important new work on the tradition of radical teaching as well as forceful suggestions for the mobilization of radical consciousness.
Contributers:
Goerge Lipsitz, Bruce Robbins, Maria Damon, John Mowitt, DonaldK. Hedrick, Neil larsen, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Peter Hitchcock, Alan Wald, Mike Hill, Ronald Strickland, Henry A. Giroux, Rachel Buff, Jason Loviglio, Carol Stabile, Timothy Brennan, Jeffrey R. di Leo, Christian Moraru, Vijay Prashad, Judith halberstam, Gregory L. Ulmer, John P. Leavey, Jr., Jeffrey Williams.

A New York Times Book of the Year

Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his books of the year

Meet Kailash. Also known as Kalashnikov. Or AK-47. Or just plain AK. His journey from India has taken him to graduate school in New York where he keeps falling in love: not just with women, but with literature and radical politics, the fuel of youthful exuberance. Each heady affair brings new learning: about himself, and about his relationship to a country founded on immigration - a country that is now unsure of the migrant's place in the nation's fabric. But how can AK learn to belong when he's in a constant state of exile

Author Biography:
Amitava Kumar was born in Patna, India. He is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. A writer and poet, he is the author, most recently, of Bombay-London-New York, also published by Routledge.

When Amitava Kumar left Patna, India, he envisioned himself as an up-and-coming citizen of the world, leaving behind the confines of Indian traditions. Yet like the wave of exiles that preceded him, he found that once we leave our past, we are defined by it: in the U.S. he is pigeonholed by his appearance and quizzed about saris and arranged marriages.
"There is no beginning that is a blank page," writes Kumar. Circling the three capitals of the Indian diaspora, Bombay-London-New York captures the contours of the expatriate experience, touching on the themes of abandonment, nostalgia, and exile that have powered some of the most prominent Indian writers today - Naipaul, Rushdie, Roy, Kureishi, as well as E.M. Forster and Gandhi.
With resonant, poetic language and a storyteller's sensibility, Kumar explores the works of these writers through the lens of his own life as an immigrant and writer. As their fiction reveals, the past of the expatriate is mythical, shaped by memory and loss.
With tales of life in India and London and meditations on the form Indian fiction gives to the lives of those who read about it, this is a sweeping, passionate search to find one's own story in the stories of others.

When Amitava Kumar left Patna, India, he envisioned himself as an up-and-coming citizen of the world, leaving behind the confines of Indian traditions. Yet like the wave of exiles that preceded him, he found that once we leave our past, we are defined by it: in the U.S. he is pigeonholed by his appearance and quizzed about saris and arranged marriages.
"There is no beginning that is a blank page," writes Kumar. Circling the three capitals of the Indian diaspora, Bombay-London-New York captures the contours of the expatriate experience, touching on the themes of abandonment, nostalgia, and exile that have powered some of the most prominent Indian writers today - Naipaul, Rushdie, Roy, Kureishi, as well as E.M. Forster and Gandhi.
With resonant, poetic language and a storyteller's sensibility, Kumar explores the works of these writers through the lens of his own life as an immigrant and writer. As their fiction reveals, the past of the expatriate is mythical, shaped by memory and loss.
With tales of life in India and London and meditations on the form Indian fiction gives to the lives of those who read about it, this is a sweeping, passionate search to find one's own story in the stories of others.

""Class Issues" reminds us that university intellectuals work in knowledge factories; that the factories produce engines of dominance; and that, therfore, sabotage has to be the order of the day. The essays state their cases with elegance, with thoroughness, and with economical precision. No one interested in addressing his or her mite of effort to transforming the world can afford to ingore this book."
--Wahneema Lubiano
Duke University

The university classroom has been turned into an intensely bitter battlefield. Conservatives are attacking the academy's ability to teach, and at times its very right to educate. As the dust begins to settle, the contributors to this volume weigh in with a constructive and wide-ranging statement on the progressive possibilities of teaching. This is, in many ways, a book for the morning after the PC Wars, when the shouting dies down and the imperatives of pedagogy remain.

Asserting a complex, inter-related agenda for teachers and students, "Class Issues" is an anthology of essays on radical teaching. Leading scholars of literary and cultural studies, queer studies, ethnic studies and working-class literature examine the challenges that confront progressive pedagogy, as well as the histories that lie behind the achievements of cultural studies. "Class Issues" offers a plan for the construction of an alternative public sphere in the rapidly changing space of the classroom in the academy.

"Class Issues" is a compilation of important new work on the tradition of radical teaching as well as forceful suggestions for the mobilization of radical consciousness.
Contributers:
Goerge Lipsitz, Bruce Robbins, Maria Damon, John Mowitt, DonaldK. Hedrick, Neil larsen, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Peter Hitchcock, Alan Wald, Mike Hill, Ronald Strickland, Henry A. Giroux, Rachel Buff, Jason Loviglio, Carol Stabile, Timothy Brennan, Jeffrey R. di Leo, Christian Moraru, Vijay Prashad, Judith halberstam, Gregory L. Ulmer, John P. Leavey, Jr., Jeffrey Williams.

Amitava Kumar's Every Day I Write the Book is for academic writers what Annie Dillard's The Writing Life and Stephen King's On Writing are for creative writers. Alongside Kumar's interviews with an array of scholars whose distinct writing offers inspiring examples for students and academics alike, the book's pages are full of practical advice about everything from how to write criticism to making use of a kitchen timer. Communication, engagement, honesty: these are the aims and sources of good writing. Storytelling, attention to organization, solid work habits: these are its tools. Kumar's own voice is present in his essays about the writing process and in his perceptive and witty observations on the academic world. A writing manual as well as a manifesto, Every Day I Write the Book will interest and guide aspiring writers everywhere.

To be a writer, Amitava Kumar says, is to be an observer. The twenty-six essays in Lunch with a Bigot are Kumar's observations of the world put into words. A mix of memoir, reportage, and criticism, the essays include encounters with writers Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, discussions on the craft of writing, and a portrait of the struggles of a Bollywood actor. The title essay is Kumar's account of his visit to a member of an ultra-right Hindu organization who put him on a hit-list. In these and other essays, Kumar tells a broader story of immigration, change, and a shift to a more globalized existence, all the while demonstrating how he practices being a writer in the world.

To be a writer, Amitava Kumar says, is to be an observer. The twenty-six essays in Lunch with a Bigot are Kumar's observations of the world put into words. A mix of memoir, reportage, and criticism, the essays include encounters with writers Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, discussions on the craft of writing, and a portrait of the struggles of a Bollywood actor. The title essay is Kumar's account of his visit to a member of an ultra-right Hindu organization who put him on a hit-list. In these and other essays, Kumar tells a broader story of immigration, change, and a shift to a more globalized existence, all the while demonstrating how he practices being a writer in the world.

Amitava Kumar's Every Day I Write the Book is for academic writers what Annie Dillard's The Writing Life and Stephen King's On Writing are for creative writers. Alongside Kumar's interviews with an array of scholars whose distinct writing offers inspiring examples for students and academics alike, the book's pages are full of practical advice about everything from how to write criticism to making use of a kitchen timer. Communication, engagement, honesty: these are the aims and sources of good writing. Storytelling, attention to organization, solid work habits: these are its tools. Kumar's own voice is present in his essays about the writing process and in his perceptive and witty observations on the academic world. A writing manual as well as a manifesto, Every Day I Write the Book will interest and guide aspiring writers everywhere.

Part reportage and part protest, "A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb" is an inquiry into the cultural logic and global repercussions of the war on terror. At its center are two men convicted in U.S. courts on terrorism-related charges: Hemant Lakhani, a seventy-year-old tried for attempting to sell a fake missile to an FBI informant, and Shahawar Matin Siraj, baited by the New York Police Department into a conspiracy to bomb a subway. Lakhani and Siraj were caught through questionable sting operations involving paid informants; both men received lengthy jail sentences. Their convictions were celebrated as major victories in the war on terror. In Amitava Kumar's riveting account of their cases, Lakhani and Siraj emerge as epic bunglers, and the U.S. government as the creator of terror suspects to prosecute. Kumar analyzed the trial transcripts and media coverage, and he interviewed Lakhani, Siraj, their families, and their lawyers. Juxtaposing such stories of entrapment in the United States with narratives from India, another site of multiple terror attacks and state crackdowns, Kumar explores the harrowing experiences of ordinary people entangled in the war on terror. He also considers the fierce critiques of post-9/11 surveillance and security regimes by soldiers and torture victims, as well as artists and writers, including Coco Fusco, Paul Shambroom, and Arundhati Roy.

""Passport Photos" is a radiant text. It connects its own ironic lyricism with an acute awareness of historical context, and is a moving document of the questions posed by symbolic migration."--Sara Suleri Goodyear, author of "Meatless Days

"Amitava Kumar brings his talents as a photographer, poet, scriptwriter, and journalist to the job of critical commentary, refusing to partition and delegate these skills to separate provinces of his intellectual life. The result is an ethical voice and a technical style that often defies our expectations of the critical commentator. I find that voice and style immensely appealing, no more so than in the multi-genre documentary work of "Passport Photos. This is not a heavy-handed screed on the conditions of immigrants. It is a sensuous guide to the common contradictions and experiences faced by immigrants to the U.S., whether they are coming from the underside of the international division of labor or from well-heeled and credentialed birthrights. An undeniably original contribution to several academic and journalistic fields, "Passport Photos will, I expect, be a widely-acclaimed publication and much cited as a fresh paradigm-shaker."--Andrew Ross, author of "The Celebration Chronicles

"An important, timely, and unique book that seems to have multiple lines of descent--as if postcolonial theory were cross-pollinated with poetry, photojournalism, and memoir all at once."--Michael Berube, author of "Life As We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child"

"Amitava Kumar is the most grounded of the postcolonial writers today. "Passport Photos" is a brilliant illustration of his skills. A must read for anybody interested in immigration,transnational identities, and globalization."--Manthia Diawara, author of "In Search of Africa

""Passport Photos" is a meditation on the modalities of the immigrant: on language as law and record of living immigrant dailiness; on place as a world one loses that gives rise to identity and belonging; on knowledge as the possession of some and not others, as what the immigrant can be but cannot have." Lisa Lowe, author of "Immigrant Acts