Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United Statesis a study of the textual, institutional, and discursive politics of online media that target, speak to, and are shaped by Indian immigrant cultures. The book’s main emphasis is on the idea of home, and its many reconfigurations online through the concept of thehomepage. It critically evaluates how homepages anchor the ideals and ideologies of belonging online in relation to two dominant imaginaries traditionally associated with the time-space of the home—namely, the domestic, familial household and the public, national homeland.

The central contention of this study is...

Home, as Mary Douglas has insightfully noted, while not necessarily fixed in space, starts by bringing space under control; creating home spaces then involves creating regular patterns of activity and structures, both in place and in time.¹ The physical structure of the house, traditionally inscribed by notions of privacy, security, family, intimacy, comfort, and control, has long represented home at a micro-level. At a macro-level, the idea of home is usually manifested as our origin story, as the place that each of us come from.²

While the homeland metaphorically operates as a collective home for the family of national citizens...

H4 Indian Ladies is an active and prolific discussion forum on Indusladies.com, one of the most popular community websites for Indian immigrants. The H4 Indian Ladies forum was created in 2005 and appears under the geographically marked section titled “USA and Canada” on the website’s discussion page under the category of “neighborhoods.”¹ That page has five geographical categories, aiming to appeal to Indians living all over the world; the USA and Canada section is second to the India section in the number of active threads and follow-up posts. As of January 2014, there are over seven hundred threads on the...

On July 2, 2012, India’s largest private sector bank ICICI launched a Facebook page for the banking services it targets to nonresident Indians (NRIs).¹ The launch was one in a series of measures by the corporation to use social media platforms to strengthen its decade-long investment in the global NRI community, especially those in the United States. Starting in the late 1990s and intensifying through the first decade of the twenty-first century, ICICI built a strategic relationship with Indian immigrants in the United States through its online banking services. The effect was remarkable: ICICI catapulted itself into a dominant position...

Konrad Aderer’s short documentaryRising Up: The Alamscenters on a Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant couple, Mohammed Alam and Sultana Jahangir, as they fight the U.S. government’s effort to deport them. In the shadow of enhanced, post-9/11 security measures, the concept of home figures as a central narrative trope. The film, produced in 2005 by Life or Liberty, a nonprofit multimedia project that supports immigrant rights, begins with scenes of the Alams in their apartment and concludes, eleven minutes later, with them as part of a public community protest, marching alongside thousands of others through the streets of New York City....

What is the most fitting way to conclude a book about immigrant belonging and the politics of home online? Rather than embracing the upbeat rhetoric of homecomings or remaking home—in the sense of creating a new, stable location in place of the old—I am emphasizing a deconstructive and critical position. As Rob Shields reminds us, “the Web is not visible from the point of one single webpage. There is no one page at which it all comes together.”¹ Although Shields is speaking more generally against totalizing myths of the Web’s technologies, the literal and metaphorical insights of his...