I was born in a furnished room in Washington Heights (NYC) to an immigrant father from British Guiana and a first-generation mother whose parents immigrated from Calabria. I spent my childhood and adolescence in Poughkeepsie, NY, in a joint family with my maternal grandparents. At the age of 16, I dropped out of a literally bankrupt public high school to attend Vassar College as one of the local students they deigned to admit. My parents, who had not had the opportunity to go to college (in my father’s case even to graduate from grammar school) were quite enlightened. They told me I should study whatever I wanted, preferably something I knew nothing about. Since, my Italian family was traditionally anti-clerical, I thought I might take some classes in the religion department. My brother, who had studied ancient history, had some books by Eliade in the house, and I became fascinated with religious mythology. I majored in religion at Vassar and then went on to Paris with a fellowship, where I completed a masters in Greek religion (under Marcel Detienne, Nicole Loraux, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet) with a thesis on female sacrificial cults to Dionysus. I returned to the States to pursue a MTS at Harvard Divinity School, where I studied Sanskrit with D.H.H. Ingalls, just before he retired. I then went to the University of Chicago in Comparative Literature, where I received my PhD under the direction of Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty.

I know that it was my social and educational experiences that pushed me in the direction of my work, the study of otherness in literary representation. In the elite institutions where I studied, I experienced overt racism, sexism, and classism. I was fascinated by those fellow students who leisurely sought to find themselves, often in the exotic East (it was, after all the 70s, and I was studying Hinduism at the time). “Finding oneself” was a luxury that I felt I could never afford. This idea, of the need for an exotic in the construction of the self, led to my initial publications. On the micro-level, I first looked at how the exotic was translated, then I examined how it filtered through European literature and the arts. This work on East-West reception led to a larger study on the decadence of exotic quests, travel narratives, translation studies, always keeping my hand in Indology and Classics. I then moved on to study otherness as it was imbricated in pedagogies and theories of alterity. I never would have embarked on this work had it not been my personal experiences and had I not found myself in the rural South at a university that struggles with issues of race. Most recently, my research has moved toward the literature of immigration.

After 35 years in US academia, I cherish my roots and the marginalization they have brought me in the American university setting and in my profession. My survival I attribute to my gateway figures: a grandmother who came to America alone at the age of 5 in steerage to join a father she had never met and was almost immediately sent to work in a sweatshop; one South American grandfather who descended from 16th century conquistadors and bandeirantes; and the other. who descended from Calabrian bandits (one was executed in Reggio at the order of the King of Naples for killing the tax collector!); and a father who was a Creole colonial citizen of King George, amateur historian, survivor of D-Day, and first-line liberator of Dachau. With this pedigree, I knew that I could certainly survive American academe.

Forty years into a scholarly life devoted to studying other cultures as a comparatist, I am a bit sad to see the demise of the humanities in the corporate university today. I am also sad at what little progress we have made in sexual politics and race relations. I am saddened that where I live and work, my daughters (whom I adopted from India), and I still get pulled over by cops and accused of being illegal Mexicans. Our need for an exotic never seems to diminish nor does the need to scapegoat. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.