The United States of India

Manan Desai's The United States of India focuses on a network of Indian and American writers and activists who met in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s. Desai uses the metaphor of refraction to describe how these writers came to understand themselves and the American scene. Unlike reflection, which depicts a true replication, refraction describes what happens when light changes direction or enters a medium with a different density. Desai argues that transnational refraction entailed people “seeing across differences ... which often meant identifying with others whose lives were remarkably different than their own, drawing comparisons between their own conditions and those of their allies. In that process, refractions had the potential of disrupting their fixed ways of looking at the world” (p. 196). These new refracted ways of seeing may distort, but they may also offer opportunities for critical self-evaluation that reflection does not. The United States

Media studies · Metaphor · Optics · Physics · Political science · Reflection (computer programming · Refraction · Sociology · Theology · Computer Science · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture