The visibility and currency of postcolonial studies in the academy today has necessitated a book like Between the Lines, in which Deepi ka Bahri and Mary Vasudeva have put together an interesting collec tion of previously unpublished interviews, commentaries, and criti cal essays. Problematizing the terms "postcolonial," "diaspora," "South Asian," and "Asian American," the contributors attempt to discard false notions of essentialization and homogeneity implied by these terms.In their Introduction, the editors discuss the rationale for their fo cus on South Asians, believing that the "historical and cultural speci ficity of South Asian experiences is often obscured or omitted within the discourse of 'Asian' studies in Anglo-America," but at the same time caution against seeing this collection as a representative profile of South Asians which they say, is a "genetic category" that can ob scure important differences of "class, religion, history, sexuality, or politics."The interviews with Meena Alexander, Gauri Viswanathan, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak provide fresh insights, even as they em phasize the necessity of making postcolonial discourse useful and meaningful outside the academy. Alexander talks about her experi ences in New York City, her writing, her role as a teacher, saying that postcolonial studies is "a field of multiplicities" and that the different narratives of the newspaper vendor and the academic must be stitched together "with the seams revealed so that the labor shows." The Viswanathan interview, very different in tone from Alexander's conversational style, grapples with the multiple meanings of the term "postcolonial" and discusses the danger of "co-option of postcolonial literature in the academy in the absence of what the term means." She believes South Asian intellectuals must "enter the broadcasting media," so as to counterbalance the Orientalizing of South Asia by some communities of South Asians in North America. Spivak questions some of the editors' underlying assumptions about postcolonialism as she takes charge of the interview, saying South MELUS,