A text-based collection that showcases the literary imagination and linguistic inventiveness of Asian writers as they negotiate their varied cultural identities. It comprises thousands of pages of English-language fiction, short fiction, and poems written from the end of the colonial era to the present and gives rich insights to scholars of literature, anthropology, linguistics, postcolonial theory and criticism, history, politics, and culture.

The collection captures a broad range of personal experiences—South Asian elites educated in legacy British colonial schools; Indian descendants of 19th-century indentured plantation and railroad laborers, now living in the Caribbean or Africa; and writers born into immigrant communities in London, Toronto, and New York.