Synopsis The present anthology puts together selected papers from the Melus-India international conference held at Hyderabad in January 2000. The theme of the conference was "Cross-Cultural Transactions: Representations of race, gender, and culture in multi-ethnic literatures of the U.S." The essays collected here cover a wide range of topics on related themes, from broad-based critical approaches to specific scrutiny of individual texts. The authors discussed include Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Bernard Malamud, Rudolfo Anaya, D’ Arcy, McNickle, Sherman Alexie, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan and Claude Mckay. The anthology has essays on Afro-American, Native American, and Asian-American literature. A couple of essays draw parallels between American texts and specific Indian texts from regional languages. Among the contributors are Sandra Gilbert, the renowned co-author of The Mad Woman in the Attic, Alice Mills from Universite de Caen, and Rebecca Haque from Bangladesh.