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About
A perceptive exploration of poetry, race, and otherness from one of our most promising voices in criticism.
Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in the north of England to Sri Lankan Tamils, and moved to the United States five years ago. Considering identity in both its political and psychological senses - as these concepts fuse, or fail to, at different times and in different places - he leaps adventurously between memoir and criticism, understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor, he writes both about and through poems, discussing Sri Lanka; experiences of racism and resilience; intergenerational trauma; pandemic parenting in an autism family; relationships shaped by the internet; growing up with a speech impediment and being sent by one's aspirational brown parents to elocution lessons; and the relative invisibility of South Asians in Western television and film. This electric, compelling hybrid memoir discovers a new way of writing about the self and also literature.
Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in the north of England to Sri Lankan Tamils, and moved to the United States five years ago. Considering identity in both its political and psychological senses - as these concepts fuse, or fail to, at different times and in different places - he leaps adventurously between memoir and criticism, understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor, he writes both about and through poems, discussing Sri Lanka; experiences of racism and resilience; intergenerational trauma; pandemic parenting in an autism family; relationships shaped by the internet; growing up with a speech impediment and being sent by one's aspirational brown parents to elocution lessons; and the relative invisibility of South Asians in Western television and film. This electric, compelling hybrid memoir discovers a new way of writing about the self and also literature.
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Reviews
"How often are we rendered strange and unmappable to ourselves by the very cultures that seek to classify and contain us? And yet, as Vidyan Ravinthiran writes, "how hard it seems, for many of us, to even begin to escape the face in the mirror!" With fearless honesty and a stunning lyric imagination, Asian/Other disrupts the silence and dispels the darkness into which so much vital testimony has b
Tracy K. Smith, poet
"Written in soaring, exhilarating prose, with the sentences impatient to pack in more ― more ideas, more thought, more life ― this book will come to be seen as a turning point in writing about literature, race, identity, and otherness."
Neel Mukherjee, author of Choice
"There's nothing like Asian/Other ... I received an education I didn't know I needed until I had found it. Read it."
Stephanie Burt, author of We Are Mermaids