There's a whole branch of the culture-industry which does nothing but police the border-texts of Empire. Some of Lehiri's stories are interesting, so she's not a good example of this. In the US university system nowadays, there's a defanged, sanitized and corporatized multiculturalism in the curriculum, which talks about diversity and difference -- while enforcing the same cruel micropolitical categories of whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, etc. etc. etc. A silicon apartheid, if you will, all the more dangerous because it's not thugs running around with swastikas, but allegedly enlightened individuals who end up reproducing the evils of the total system. In turn, there's a cottage industry of ethnic literature by diasporic Indian-American professionals whose main market is precisely the university system. Some of these are fine texts, but texts from Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Urdu etc. authors get left out. It's the same old ideology of the American Dream, only the frontier has shifted to the Third World, and the Indians are now... Indians.
-- DRR