Passport Photos

Passport Photos is a beautiful book. Kumar uses photos, poetry and essays to give a rare insight into post-colonialism and immigration. Kumar's writing is helping to make the American people less ignorant to issues concerning immigration, cultural imperialism and patriotism.

I am a South Asian journalist living in New Jersey. Very little has been said about Amitava Kumar's photographs. They present different facets of our world. What is striking is that he frames the photographs, and one could argue, our world, in new and critical ways.The South Asian Journalists Association organized a reading by Kumar at the Brecht Forum. I enjoyed the reading immensely, and when I read the book, I saw that book was also a performance -- which brought together the world of academia, art, and journalism.

While Amitava Kumar fashions his book as a 'false passport' with all the mandatory items like Name, Nationality, Date and Place of Birth etc., its really one of the most authentic documents that I've ever read. Kumar's incisive and clear writing style takes the reader through anecdotes, poems, descriptions of photos and sometimes even less known facts about the immigrant experience.

Passport photos is an extraordinarily delightful read, and I unreservedly recommend it to anyone who is interested in a sensitive portrayal of the immigrant experience. The book is like immigrants themselves. It speaks in multiple languages, and is obsessed with documents. Among its many tongues, it speaks in academic and political cadences, mixes prose and poetry, sprinkles Urdu and Spanish, quotes Namdeo Dhasal, a poet from India and Louis Arrago, a Mexican poet-activist. It layers Urdu upon Spanish, words upon pictures, and best of all, garnishes it with Kumar's poetry, which is quite magical. There are several poems, each of which is worth the price of admission on a stand alone basis. I personally recommend two; one called "Letter to India Abroad" and another titled "India Day Parade on Madison Avenue". The book represents the multi-layered experience of immigrants without reducing it to word-play The book also works because of an extremely inventive structure. Using the information structure of the passport, a document "that chooses to tell a story about us", Kumar writes an alternative story of such terms as "Name", Photograph", Place of Birth", "Date of Birth", "Nationality", "Sex", "Profession" and "Identifying Marks". In his discussion of names, for instance, Kumar explores how members of the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean ended up with names like "Chris Garcia", refracting their identities through Venezuelan birth certificates to appease bureaucratic border-keepers. He provides a delightful litany of stereotypes to which South Asian immigrants are subjected - "every time an American shakes my hand, he or she has to pledge their love for Indian food, and I can't even say I thank you - on behalf of Indian food". What is the date of the immigrant's birth? For some, it may be the moment when staying back in the homeland was not an option any more. The forced migrations of post-partition India and Pakistan, the moments of communal riots in Bombay and Bhiwandi, the dismemberment of diasporic Indians from Uganda, all these wrenching moments are sensitively laid out. Kumar depicts the hopelessly fragmented nationality of the immigrant in a series of photographs of Kashmir. He also talks about the way in which multinational corporations compete for our identity as nations once did ("I have lost India. You have lost Pakistan. We are now citizens of General Electric"). These corporations bring the promise of progress to the third world, but unleash primordial oppressions (like the ultrasonographs that are used in the hinterland for fetal sex determination and female feticide). Such vignettes, pieces of analysis, poetry, pictures, quotes and wit characterize this book, which ultimately fulfils its promise as a forged passport, which exposes the document's cruelty, its arbitrariness, its truncations, its caprice, and above all, its profound silliness. Passports will never appear the sa