Author Archives: Crystal Parikh

About Crystal Parikh

Crystal Parikh is associate professor of English and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is the author of An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literature and Culture (Fordham, 2009), which won the MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary Studies. She coedited The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2015) with Daniel Y. Kim. Parikh's second monograph is entitled Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). She is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature.

The Innocents: Reading Refugees in National Culture and Diasporic Literatures

January 18, 2018 by
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Early in Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Lê’s first-person six-year-old narrator finds herself in communion with the glass animals locked in a display case in the office of the Russell family, which sponsors her, her father, and four other men—”the uncles”—who accompanied them as they fled from Vietnam to the United States. She tells the animals about her journey on the boat and rescue at sea by the U.S. Navy, memories of her mother from whom she and Continue reading → Continue reading →