The Gopals are like most American families. Ravi and Kalpana Gopal and their daughter Lavanya live in Hackensack, New Jersey, a short drive from the Big Apple. They have a four-bedroom house, two cars, and most importantly, a sense of financial security all Americans crave.

But behind the facade of stability lies a family falling apart at the seams, torn by the past and driven apart by the idealistic expectations and reality. Beaten up by their own insecurities and their inability to express themselves, the Gopals are finding that pursuing the American dream can be a nightmare, and that keeping their sanity is harder than keeping up appearances.

Meet the Gopals, who live in the "House of Tinder."

Desi Rap is a collection of essays from South Asian American activists, academics, and hip-hop artists that explores four main ideas: hip-hop as a means of expression of racial identity, class status, gender, sexuality, racism, and culture; the appropriation of Black racial identity by South Asian American consumers of hip-hop; the furthering of the discourse on race and ethnic identity in the United States through hip-hop; and the exploration of South Asian Americans' use of hip-hop as a form of social protest. Ultimately, this volume is about broadening our horizons through hip-hop and embracing the South Asian American community's polycultural legacy and future.

This edited volume seeks to build a scholarly discourse about how Hinduism is being defined, reformed, and rearticulated in the digital era and how these changes are impacting the way Hindus view their own religious identities. It seeks to interrogate how digital Hinduism has been shaped in response to the dominant framing of the religion, which has often relied on postcolonial narratives devoid of context and an overemphasis on the geopolitics of the Indian subcontinent post-partition. From this perspective, this volume challenges previous frameworks of how Hinduism has been studied, particularly in the West, where Marxist and Orientalist approaches are often ill-fitting paradigms to understanding Hinduism. This volume engages with and critiques some of these approaches while also enriching existing models of research within media studies, ethnography, cultural studies, and religion.

The Gopals are like most American families. Ravi and Kalpana Gopal and their daughter Lavanya live in Hackensack, New Jersey, a short drive from the Big Apple. They have a four-bedroom house, two cars, and most importantly, a sense of financial security all Americans crave.

But behind the facade of stability lies a family falling apart at the seams, torn by the past and driven apart by the idealistic expectations and reality. Beaten up by their own insecurities and their inability to express themselves, the Gopals are finding that pursuing the American dream can be a nightmare, and that keeping their sanity is harder than keeping up appearances.

Meet the Gopals, who live in the "House of Tinder."

Desi Rap is a collection of essays from South Asian American activists, academics, and hip-hop artists that explores four main ideas: hip-hop as a means of expression of racial identity, class status, gender, sexuality, racism, and culture; the appropriation of Black racial identity by South Asian American consumers of hip-hop; the furthering of the discourse on race and ethnic identity in the United States through hip-hop; and the exploration of South Asian Americans' use of hip-hop as a form of social protest. Ultimately, this volume is about broadening our horizons through hip-hop and embracing the South Asian American community's polycultural legacy and future.

Zombies are everywhere these days. We are consuming zombies as much as they are said to be consuming us in mediated apocalyptic scenarios on popular television shows, video game franchises and movies. The "zombie industry" generates billions a year through media texts and other cultural manifestations (zombie races and zombie-themed parks, to name a few). Zombies, like vampires, werewolves, witches and wizards, have become both big dollars for cultural producers and the subject of audience fascination and fetishization. With popular television shows such as AMC's The Walking Dead (based on the popular graphic novel) and movie franchises such as the ones pioneered by George Romero, global fascination with zombies does not show signs of diminishing. In The Thinking Dead: What the Zombie Apocalypse Means, edited by Murali Balaji, scholars ask why our culture has becomes so fascinated by the zombie apocalypse. Essays address this question from a range of theoretical perspectives that tie our consumption of zombies to larger narratives of race, gender, sexuality, politics, economics and the end of the world. Thinking Dead brings together an array of media and cultural studies scholars whose contributions to understanding our obsession with zombies will far outlast the current trends of zombie popularity.