The Accidental American discussion

Rinku Sen is the President and Executive Director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) and Publisher of ColorLines magazine. She is the author of Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing, and, most recently, of The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization, available at Progressive Book Club.

Which books have most influenced you?

There are two; they’re both novels. One is The Known World by Edward P. Jones and the second one—you’ll note a similar theme—is The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji. I happened to read these books in 2005, one right after the other, and they’re very interesting because they’re both about the middleman position in a society. The Known World is about a community of freed slaves in 1860s Virginia who own slaves themselves but largely as a way of freeing their family members from slaveholders. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is about an Indian man growing up in Kenya just before the anti-colonialist revolutions in Kenya. In both cases, the story is really about that person who is in between the oppressed and the oppressor, and that’s a position that I relate to very closely, being brown-skinned Indian immigrant from a professional family in the United States trying to figure out where my place is in the racial hierarchy of the U.S., and what my role is to be contributing towards everyone’s liberation. So I highly recommend those two very moving books.

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