Shame and Recovery: Mapping Identity in an Asian Woman's Shelter.

• Author: Hegde, Radha S.
• Position: Book Review

Shame and Recovery: Mapping Identity in an Asian Woman's Shelter. By K. E. Supriya. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishers, 2002; pp. xi + 280. $29.95

K. E. Supriya's Shame and Recovery: Mapping Identity in an Asian Women's Shelter is a powerfully written book that provides a moving account of the lives and struggles of South Asian immigrant women in a battered women's shelter. Supriya does an admirable job of capturing the complex reality of the immigrant experience through textured ethnographic portraits of three women in their journey from violence to recovery. Her book makes a significant contribution to the growing field of South Asian diasporic studies and stands apart for its dexterous ability to work through and with the stories of lives wounded by violence and lost in the cultural displacement of immigration.

Supriya examines a daunting subject whose complexity is both overwhelming and intimidating in terms of its complexity. Writing about violence in the lives of third world women is a challenging task since every choice made by the writer whether stylistic, theoretical or pragmatic, has a ripple effect on how the representation is read and circulated. Ethnographic representations of oppression often end up reinforcing stereotypes or offering culturalist explanations that are most often reductive and highly problematic. As Narayan (1997) writes, there are no "methodological guarantees that can ensure that feminist politics do not create their own misrepresentations and marginalization" (p. 37). Supriya's ethnography, however, responds to this difficult challenge and, in the process, reinvigorates the methodological dialogue from a postcolonial feminist perspective. She has chosen the right register to document the stories of violence and transformation and, in addition, engages in debate with a range of critical literatures. The narratives presented in this study capture the voices and struggles of South Asian women and demonstrate how good ethnography can refuse and overcome one-dimensional representations of the Other. Supriya has successfully crafted an ethnographic gaze that is simultaneously analytic and humane.

In the context of transnational moves, human lives and relationships get reconfigured paradoxically in unexpected yet predictable ways. Women in the transnational circuit of immigrant moves are crushed in the violent imbrication of gendered, raced and state power. Research that delves into the intersection of these...