South Asian Religions in Contemporary America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khyati Joshi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
Public Square ◽  
The Past ◽  
Asian Religions ◽  
Asian Immigration

Although South Asian American histories stretch back centuries, South Asian immigration to the United States has been increasing particularly rapidly over the past three decades. Made up predominantly of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, the immigrant cohorts represented in this group are both racial and religious minorities in the United States—neither white nor Christian. This chapter locates contemporary South Asian immigration in its historical context, illustrating the complexities of how racial status and religious background have impacted the perception of immigrants in the United States from the 1800s to the present day. Against that backdrop, the chapter also discusses contemporary South Asian American experiences, particularly those which illustrate how these communities live religion as participants in the American public square.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Himanee Gupta-Carlson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
South Asians ◽  
The United States ◽  
The South ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
Race And Religion

The introduction introduces the central themes of the book and highlights its significance. It opens by exploring the wedding of the (a Hindu female of Indian ancestry) to a white, Christian male and places racial and religious tensions embedded in that event within the larger context of race and religion as organizing forces in American life. The introduction also describes auto-ethnography and discourse analysis, and discusses how these methods are used throughout the work. It also offers a profile of the South Asian American community in Muncie and of South Asians in the United States.

Reading South Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajini Srikanth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
Global Vision

“South Asia” is the term used to refer to that part of Asia that comprises Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. South Asian American literary studies emerged from the ethnic studies movements in the United States during the late 1960s. Asian American literary studies has analyzed poetry, fiction, memoir, and drama by writers of South Asian descent living in the United States, first by looking at the principal thematic impulses found in the writings and the literary techniques employed by authors from the early 1900s into the 21st century. Scholars have also argued that the worldviews and representations of South Asian American writers, sometimes considered within the category of “postcolonial” literature rather than multiethnic literature, gesture beyond the narrow confines of genre, nation, religion, ethnicity, and culture. South Asian American literary studies illuminates these texts’ unexpected connectivities, global vision, and entwined histories and highlights how those who read them have the opportunity to enlarge their consciousness.

scholarly journals South Asian American Visual Culture and Representation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bakirathi Mani
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Contributions ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
Diverse Field ◽  
The Us

South Asian American visual culture is a diverse field of visual art, created by artists who are first-, second- and third-generation immigrants from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, among other diasporic locations (e.g., Kenya). South Asian American artists work in a range of media forms, including photography, sculpture, installation, video, painting, and drawing. Collectively, these artworks are frequently exhibited in museums and galleries as depictions of contemporary South Asian immigrant life. However, a close reading of individual works produces a more dynamic picture. Instead of viewing South Asian American visual culture solely in terms of artists’ own immigrant biographies, scholarship and museum practices have begun to focus on how its aesthetic and political contributions have been central to the representation of racialized, gendered, and sexualized immigrant bodies in the United States since the turn of the millennium. Drawing across archival collections, aesthetic histories, and digital media forms, artists create works that link the colonial documentation of “native” bodies on the subcontinent with the surveillance and documentation of immigrant bodies by the US state. Alongside artists, academics and activists also work to produce curatorial interventions through exhibitions that generate feminist and queer critiques of the relation between nation-state and diaspora. Emphasizing the transnational ties of capital and labor that bind together the subcontinent with the United States, South Asian American visual culture creates new frameworks for the relationship between race, visuality, and representation.

Category Crisis: South Asian Americans and Questions of Race and Ethnicity

1998 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-320
Author(s):  
Susan Koshy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
South Asians ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
South Asian Americans

The identity of South Asians in the United States has proved to be problematic, both for the self-identification of the group and for the identifying institutions and popular perceptions of the host society. As a result, a certain exceptionalism (commonly indexed as ambiguity) has come to attach itself to the historiography of South Asian American racial formation. This exceptionalism, in turn, has formed the ground for two competing constructions of South Asian American racial identity that wield significant influence today. One view, represented by some of the major immigrant organizations and reproduced by many middle-class immigrants, stresses ethnicity and class and denies or mitigates the historical salience of race for South Asians in the United States. This position emphasizes the anomalous status of South Asian Americans among racial minorities and embraces the rhetoric of a color-blind meritocracy. The second position, associated mainly with scholars and students in the humanities and social sciences and with some activists, treats South Asian color consciousness as equivalent to white racism and criticizes the immigrant community for denying its own blackness. These critics advocate that South Asian Americans politicize their identity, like their diasporic counterparts in Britain, by forming coalitions with other people of color. Ironically, both positions tend to construct racial identification as a choice, inadvertently reproducing the American ideology of self-making and possibility in discussing one of the social arenas where it has been least applicable.

The Challenges of Displaying “Asian American”: Curatorial Perspectives and Critical Approaches

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-32
Author(s):  
ShiPu Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
Art Exhibitions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Racial Demographics

This essay delineates the issues concerning AAPI art exhibitions from a curator’s perspective, particularly in response to the changing racial demographics and economics of the past decades. A discussion of practical, curatorial problems offers the reader an overview of the obstacles and reasons behind the lack of exhibitions of AAPI works in the United States. It is the author’s hope that by understanding the challenges particular to AAPI exhibitions, community leaders, and patrons will direct future financial support to appropriate museum operations, which in turn will encourage more exhibitions and research of the important artistic contribution of AAPI artists to American art.

Prologue

2020 ◽  
pp. 29-42
Author(s):  
Uzma Quraishi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Law ◽  
Asian Immigration ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Transnational Narrative ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Indian Immigration

The formation of the Indian middle class around the mid-nineteenth century and of policies of race-based U.S. immigration exclusion in the same time period bears some explanation, since these spatially distinct but temporally overlapping processes merged during the Cold War. The historical development of these eventually entwining, transnational narrative strands forms the substance of this prologue. Concentrating on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the prologue provides the foundational context on which to build a narrative of postwar South Asian immigration to the United States. It provides historical context of the histories of anti-Asian immigration law in the United States and Indian immigration.

Indian Dance in Diaspora: US and Australian Contexts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Priya Srinivasan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Law ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
National Policies ◽  
Asian Immigration ◽  
Indian Dance

This article takes a critical and historical look at how South Asian performers and performances circulated in the late 19th and 20th centuries in the United States and Australia. It compares how dance practices, both in the United States and in Australia, are interwoven with 19th- and early 20th-century Orientalism and anti-Asian immigration law in both countries, as primarily white dancers engaged with Indian dance practices to develop intercultural styles of Western contemporary dance. While the comparisons of Indian dance in the United States and Australia highlight the similarities of national policies that curtailed Asian immigration, they also suggest that the patterns of migration and travel, particularly where dance is concerned, are much more complex. Dancers and dance forms moved from India to Australia to the United States in an intricate triangle of exchange and influence.

Animating Gandhi

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shilpa S. Davé
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
South Asians ◽  
The United States ◽  
White Masculinity ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
American Character ◽  
South Asian Americans ◽  
Asian History

This chapter discusses how the Indian American character is the accent or the suburban “sidekick” character to the dominant narratives of young, white masculinity that are prevalent in American culture. The representation and use of the historical figure Mohandas Gandhi in the MTV animated series Clone High revisits and challenges American representations of Asian Americans and South Asian Americans as model minorities. The use of the historical leader Gandhi as a teenage “geek” sidekick without recognition of how Gandhi fits into South Asian history and influences South Asian American communities shows how American stereotypes dwarf any other representation of South Asians or South Asian Americans in the United States.

scholarly journals MEDELLÍN: FERTILE SEEDS OF PASTORAL CONVERSION IN THE UNITED STATES

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
Allan Figueroa Deck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Vatican Council ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
The Past ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
Grass Root ◽  
Hispanic Latinos

SUMMARY: This article explores the way in which the event of Medellín as well as the document have played a significant part in the unfolding of pastoral and social ministries with and for Hispanic/Latinos in the United States over the past fifty years. The reception in the United States of Medellín in the wider context of the follow-up to the Second Vatican Council has been wide and deep in terms of several developments outlined here. Faith-based social ministries in Hispanic/Latino communities in the form of grass root community organizations in the tradition of Saul Alinsky found inspiration in Medellin’s option for the poor and pastoral de conjunto. Many other examples of Medellín’s impact are placed in the wider historical context of the past fifty years, the half century in which Hispanics/Latinos emerged as the majority of U.S. Catholics under the age of 35.RESUMO: Este artigo investiga a forma pela qual tanto o evento como o documento de Medellín tiveram papel significativo na evolução dos ministérios pastorais e sociais da população de origem latino-americana dos Estados Unidos nos últimos cinquenta anos. A recepção de Medellín nos Estados Unidos, dentro do contexto mais amplo que se seguiu ao Concílio Vaticano II, foi ampla e profunda, e é aqui delineada em seus muitos desdobramentos. Naquelas comunidades de origem latino-americana, na forma de organizações comunitárias de base conforme a tra­dição de Saul Alinsky, os ministérios sociais de cunho confessional foram influen­ciados pela opção pelos pobres e pela pastoral de conjunto lançadas por Medellín. Vários outros exemplos do impacto causado por Medellín são aqui situados no seu contexto histórico mais amplo da última metade de século, período no qual a população de origem latino-americana despontou como majoritária entre todos os católicos norte-americanos na faixa etária até 35 anos.

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