new look, same great taste

no more mangoes is now culture shock!

Dear reader,

I’m writing this message to share a big announcement about the future of this Substack—as of today, no more mangoes is officially changing its name to culture shock!

The name change is part of a larger effort to reorient this blog’s overall mission, aimed at broadening the range of topics that are covered here. I’ll still be writing about the issues and themes that I’ve focused on over the last fourteen months—migration, diaspora, cultural identity, etc.—but going forward, you can expect to see more in the way of more general cultural criticism and commentary as well. I chose the name culture shock because I felt it succinctly married these two focuses—small-c ‘culture’ in the sense of diaspora and identity, which I’ve largely been writing about thus far, and capital-C ‘Culture’ in the sense of the broader zeitgeist that I’d like to write about more in the weeks and months ahead.

You might be wondering what prompted this sudden rebrand. The answer is this: when I started no more mangoes back in May of 2022, I did so out of a sense of frustration—so much diaspora writing, particularly from South Asian writers, seemed to me to place an inordinate emphasis on the same tired tropes and superficial analyses of oppression and Othering, without ever really engaging diasporic themes through a more critical lens. With no more mangoes, I hoped to counter this trend in my own small way, writing about these themes and issues from a radical, critical perspective.

In the process, however, I soon found myself feeling stuck, as if I’d painted myself into somewhat of a corner. In trying to carve out a unique niche for myself as a writer, it seemed, I’d set myself up to be ensnared by the same trap in which so many writers find themselves caught—the dreaded pigeonhole, in which writers of color feel like they can only be taken seriously if they write about a narrow set of themes revolving around race and identity. It’s not that I didn’t want to write about these issues, but rather that by limiting the scope of no more mangoes from the outset in the name of establishing a niche, I’d inadvertently made it so that these were the only topics I felt like I could write about here. Each time a new idea came to mind for a personal essay or a piece of cultural criticism about something not related in some way to race, diaspora, or South Asia, I felt a painful twinge of frustration at the knowledge that I couldn’t simply write about it for my Substack, that if I wanted to do anything with the idea at hand, I’d have to find another outlet to publish it—a process which, in addition to being long and arduous, also frequently involves giving up a considerable degree of creative control over the final product.

It’s my hope that by reorienting the focus of this blog, I’ll be able to use it as a place to more comfortably write about a wider range of topics. I’ll still be writing about diasporic issues from time to time, though they’ll no longer be the sole focus. When I do, I’ll still be publishing them under the no more mangoes label, and you’ll be able to find all of them under the no more mangoes tab at the top of the homepage (right next to the tab for the dispatch, which I’ll be reviving soon as a monthly newsletter). Everything else, however, will be published under the new umbrella of culture shock!

Thank you all for your continued support as I take this blog into a new and (hopefully) very exciting stage of its life—stay tuned for the first essay of the culture shock era, which should be coming out very soon! In the meantime, I hope you will consider sharing this publication with anyone you know who may be interested in thoughtful, incisive cultural commentary on a wide range of issues. Each new subscriber who joins this community warms my heart a little more!

And of course, if you have any thoughts, questions, or concerns, please do leave a comment below and I promise I will reply :)

Much literary love,

Pranay

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culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer, essayist, and cultural critic Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox: