ABSTRACT
"Stranded at a Distance responds to Amitava Kumar's Bombay-London-New York by asking readers to consider the elegance and nuances of the prose as well as subtlety with which Kumar interrogates current postcolonial theories of representation, hybridity, and "home." While Kumar's work refuses the facile essentializing that characterizes so much identity theory (either in its final moves or in its attacks), it also retains something of the humanness that typifies Kumar's entire project. This piece argues that Kumar's book is flexible yet insistent in its demands of a recognition of places, labor, and connections that no longer fit easily into the conventional pigeonholes. It refuses to allow those who are at home in the world in general, but who can call no particular place home, to become "invisible," only so much background noise, undifferentiated labor, completely at the mercy of a culture that does not because it cannot recognize them.
