Rating: 
Summary: Good performance
Review: I am a South Asian journalist living in New Jersey. Very little has been said about Amitava Kumar's photographs. They present different facets of our world. What is striking is that he frames the photographs, and one could argue, our world, in new and critical ways.
The South Asian Journalists Association organized a reading by Kumar at the Brecht Forum. I enjoyed the reading immensely, and when I read the book, I saw that book was also a performance -- which brought together the world of academia, art, and journalism.
Rating: 
Summary: Pandering to White Expectations of the Immigrant Experience
Review: I have to agree with "a reader from new york" (August 7). This book is an example of complicity on the part of a minority academic in neo-orientalist constructions.
Rating:
Summary: Extremely disappointing
Review: Like author, I also have a similar background, and thought this book would make an interesting read. I was terribly disappointed. This book is the most vague book I have ever read.
The author has done extremely poor job. With his communist leanings, he should be thrown out of the west, the west that he tries to pander relentlessly in this "book".
Save your money!!
Rating:
Summary: Rare insight
Review: Passport Photos is a beautiful book. Kumar uses photos, poetry and essays to give a rare insight into post-colonialism and immigration. Kumar's writing is helping to make the American people less ignorant to issues concerning immigration, cultural imperialism and patriotism.
Rating:
Summary: A new take on the immigrant experience
Review: Passport photos is an extraordinarily delightful read, and I unreservedly recommend it to anyone who is interested in a sensitive portrayal of the immigrant experience. The book is like immigrants themselves. It speaks in multiple languages, and is obsessed with documents. Among its many tongues, it speaks in academic and political cadences, mixes prose and poetry, sprinkles Urdu and Spanish, quotes Namdeo Dhasal, a poet from India and Louis Arrago, a Mexican poet-activist. It layers Urdu upon Spanish, words upon pictures, and best of all, garnishes it with Kumar's poetry, which is quite magical. There are several poems, each of which is worth the price of admission on a stand alone basis. I personally recommend two; one called "Letter to India Abroad" and another titled "India Day Parade on Madison Avenue". The book represents the multi-layered experience of immigrants without reducing it to word-play The book also works because of an extremely inventive structure. Using the information structure of the passport, a document "that chooses to tell a story about us", Kumar writes an alternative story of such terms as "Name", Photograph", Place of Birth", "Date of Birth", "Nationality", "Sex", "Profession" and "Identifying Marks". In his discussion of names, for instance, Kumar explores how members of the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean ended up with names like "Chris Garcia", refracting their identities through Venezuelan birth certificates to appease bureaucratic border-keepers. He provides a delightful litany of stereotypes to which South Asian immigrants are subjected - "every time an American shakes my hand, he or she has to pledge their love for Indian food, and I can't even say I thank you - on behalf of Indian food". What is the date of the immigrant's birth? For some, it may be the moment when staying back in the homeland was not an option any more. The forced migrations of post-partition India and Pakistan, the moments of communal riots in Bombay and Bhiwandi, the dismemberment of diasporic Indians from Uganda, all these wrenching moments are sensitively laid out. Kumar depicts the hopelessly fragmented nationality of the immigrant in a series of photographs of Kashmir. He also talks about the way in which multinational corporations compete for our identity as nations once did ("I have lost India. You have lost Pakistan. We are now citizens of General Electric"). These corporations bring the promise of progress to the third world, but unleash primordial oppressions (like the ultrasonographs that are used in the hinterland for fetal sex determination and female feticide). Such vignettes, pieces of analysis, poetry, pictures, quotes and wit characterize this book, which ultimately fulfils its promise as a forged passport, which exposes the document's cruelty, its arbitrariness, its truncations, its caprice, and above all, its profound silliness. Passports will never appear the same to me, after Kumar's exposé.
Rating:
Summary: A new take on the immigrant experience
Review: Passport photos is an extraordinarily delightful read, and I unreservedly recommend it to anyone who is interested in a sensitive portrayal of the immigrant experience. The book is like immigrants themselves. It speaks in multiple languages, and is obsessed with documents. Among its many tongues, it speaks in academic and political cadences, mixes prose and poetry, sprinkles Urdu and Spanish, quotes Namdeo Dhasal, a poet from India and Louis Arrago, a Mexican poet-activist. It layers Urdu upon Spanish, words upon pictures, and best of all, garnishes it with Kumar's poetry, which is quite magical. There are several poems, each of which is worth the price of admission on a stand alone basis. I personally recommend two; one called "Letter to India Abroad" and another titled "India Day Parade on Madison Avenue". The book represents the multi-layered experience of immigrants without reducing it to word-play The book also works because of an extremely inventive structure. Using the information structure of the passport, a document "that chooses to tell a story about us", Kumar writes an alternative story of such terms as "Name", Photograph", Place of Birth", "Date of Birth", "Nationality", "Sex", "Profession" and "Identifying Marks". In his discussion of names, for instance, Kumar explores how members of the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean ended up with names like "Chris Garcia", refracting their identities through Venezuelan birth certificates to appease bureaucratic border-keepers. He provides a delightful litany of stereotypes to which South Asian immigrants are subjected - "every time an American shakes my hand, he or she has to pledge their love for Indian food, and I can't even say I thank you - on behalf of Indian food". What is the date of the immigrant's birth? For some, it may be the moment when staying back in the homeland was not an option any more. The forced migrations of post-partition India and Pakistan, the moments of communal riots in Bombay and Bhiwandi, the dismemberment of diasporic Indians from Uganda, all these wrenching moments are sensitively laid out. Kumar depicts the hopelessly fragmented nationality of the immigrant in a series of photographs of Kashmir. He also talks about the way in which multinational corporations compete for our identity as nations once did ("I have lost India. You have lost Pakistan. We are now citizens of General Electric"). These corporations bring the promise of progress to the third world, but unleash primordial oppressions (like the ultrasonographs that are used in the hinterland for fetal sex determination and female feticide). Such vignettes, pieces of analysis, poetry, pictures, quotes and wit characterize this book, which ultimately fulfils its promise as a forged passport, which exposes the document's cruelty, its arbitrariness, its truncations, its caprice, and above all, its profound silliness. Passports will never appear the same to me, after Kumar's exposé.
Rating: 
Summary: Precious and Self-Obsessed
Review: Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this book is the perfection with which it achieves the standard contemporary literary tone of precious artiness, adding to that a self-referential style that never allows the reader out of the jealous and controlling grasp of the author even for a nano-second, and the sort of facile political posturing that has made universties such unbearable places to be these days. I actually burst into laughter any number of times when the dead-serious author said something so utterly and humorlessly awful that I could not believe he had the audacity to print it. Well, such is academic life these days. Best to avoid this book unless you like the sort of kitschy, naive-arty posturing on display, or if you are interested in what I think of as faculty meeting nouveau in art.
Rating: 
Summary: Breezy, Busy, and a Little Pretentious
Review: The idea of forging a passport, of asserting and altering and maintaing identity, is not exactly new, but in this case is updated and given a fresh twist by focusing attention upon Indians, Indian Americans, and Native Americans, among others. The other two reviewers here, suspiciously sounding like cheerleaders, point to all the good qualities of this book, but miss the problems: that economically priviledged immigrant experience differs markedly from impoverished immigrants, as any impoverished immigrant will tell you. Indian Americans, the *highest* per capita income earners in the US (the *wealthiest* nation in the world) come from a variety of economic backgrounds, as well as an enormously varied group of cultural and linguistic contexts. This book offers the mile-wide, yard-deep picture, with politics and some embarassingly mediocre poetry unable to give proper depth to the account of oppressed Indians on several continents. But however serious a criticism that is, I would nevertheless recommend this book for its entertaining presentation - fun in a buys if didactic way, with a direct yet elusive focus. Kumar, a professor at the State University of Pennsylvania (different from UPenn), has an entertaining, digressive manner, incorporating if not actually integrating the experiences of many displaced and disadvanted people. One would of course prefer to hear these voices themselves, but Kumar at least helps point to them. Overall, highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: A very pretentious book
Review: This was a book very hard to get thru. Kumar belongs to the new generation of Indo-English writers who try hard to please the white sahibs.
Rating:
Summary: an authentic passport
Review: While Amitava Kumar fashions his book as a 'false passport' with all the mandatory items like Name, Nationality, Date and Place of Birth etc., its really one of the most authentic documents that I've ever read. Kumar's incisive and clear writing style takes the reader through anecdotes, poems, descriptions of photos and sometimes even less known facts about the immigrant experience.
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