kith [noun] one's friends, acquaintances, neighbours, or relations.
In Kith, award-winning writer Divya Victor engages Indian-American diasporic culture in the twentieth century, via an autobiographical account that explores what 'kith' might mean outside of the national boundaries of those people belonging to the Indian and South East Asian diasporas.
Through an engagement with the effects of globalization on identity formation, cultural and linguistic exchange, and demographic difference, Kith explores questions about race and ethnic difference: How do 'brownness' and 'blackness' emerge as traded commodities in the transactions of globalization? What are the symptoms of belonging? How and why does 'kith' diverge from 'kin,' and what are the affects and politics of this divergence? Historically-placed and well-researched, Kith is an unflinching and simultaneous account of both systemic and interpersonal forms of violence and wounding in the world today.

Divya Victor is the two-time Pushcart-nominated author of several books and chapbooks, including Natural Subjects (winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), UNSUB, and Things To Do With Your Mouth. Her chapbooks include Semblance, Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place, and SUTURES. She was born in southern India and lives in the US and Singapore, where she is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Writing at Nanyang Technological University.

Divya Victor's profile page