scholarly journals Creative Pluralism in Indian and Romanian Accounts of Transnational Migration

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-116
Author(s):  
Adriana Elena Stoican
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
American Character ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Jhumpa Lahiri ◽  
Cultural Origins

Abstract The paper offers a comparative perspective on transmigrant cultural identities as illustrated in the works of two contemporary South Asian American and Romanian American authors, Jhumpa Lahiri and Aura Imbăruș. The comparison involves Gogol, a South Asian American character, and Aura, the author of the memoir Out of the Transylvania Night. Although Gogol is a fictional character and Aura is an actual transmigrant, their comparative assessment relies on the assumption that both narratives are inspired by the authors’ background of relocation. Despite their different cultural origins, both authors share thematic aspects related to the dynamics of cultural identity in the context of migration. This paper aims to provide a starting point for an enlarged framework of comparative analysis, in order to foreground intersections between different experiences of cultural negotiation in the context of displacement. Born and raised in America, Gogol is challenged by his cultural multiplicity and strives to suppress elements of his Indian identity. After years of rebelling against his parents’ norms, Gogol shifts to the Bengali model, when his father dies. Once he accepts the relevance of his cultural roots, Gogol is able to plunge into a dimension situated beyond his Bengali and American selves. His transcendent strategy is illustrated by his decision to plunge into a third space of redefinition, suggested by the Russian literature which is appreciated by Gogol’s father. Aura Imbăruș offers the example of a first generation Romanian transmigrant who undergoes voluntary relocation to the United States. Fascinated by the American world, Aura is eager to take over norms of material success and consumerism, overlooking the relevance of her cultural roots. When she undergoes a personal family crisis, Aura eventually reassesses the value of her Romanian background, aiming to reconcile her source culture with her Americanised self. In a manner similar to Gogol’s, Aura manages to integrate American norms of success, while forging enduring bonds with the Romanian American community in California.

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.

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.

The War on Terror and South Asian American Narrative Representation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anantha Sudhakar
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
South Asians ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
Muslim Communities

The social and political conditions actuated by 9/11 have been a major catalyst for new literature, television and film about South Asians and Muslims in America. Stemming from a 2001 speech by then-president George W. Bush, the concept of the “War on Terror” has served to rationalize the domestic regulation of Muslims, while also validating the need for US imperialist and capitalist expansion. Where US government discourse highlights first-person narratives that figure America as a benevolent global protector of freedom and democracy, South Asian American fictional and non-fictional narratives posit critiques of Islamophobia and the US security state. Spanning a breadth of genres and styles, including the paradigmatic 9/11 novel, the bildungsroman, comedic satire, dramatic monologue, magic realism, documentary film, and urban fiction, South Asian American literature and media highlight narratives of interfaith and cross-racial solidarity. The imaginary worlds of these texts confront the injustices of US imperialism and the global War on Terror for Muslim communities both in the United States and abroad. At the same, South Asian American representation engaged with the impacts of post-9/11 politics and society has enriched understanding of the complex lived experiences of Pakistani and Bangladeshi Americans, as well as those of Indian Americans who are Muslim or trace their ancestry to the Sikh-majority state of Punjab. By centering the perspectives of those communities most affected by detention, xenophobia, and surveillance, post-9/11 South Asian American literature and media reveal how the exigencies of history produce new forms of narrative and cultural practice.

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.

Selling the East in the American South

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivek Bald
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American South ◽  
South Asians ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
Southern States ◽  
American Orientalism ◽  
The American South ◽  
Commercial Network

This chapter discusses the complex racializations and negotiations of South Asian sailors who jumped ship in Southern and Northeastern seaports and became entrepreneurs who traded ethnic notions within the larger cultural economy of Orientalism of the time. This early history expands the South Asian American narrative to include a group of previously unknown migrants who lived and worked in the United States as early as the 1880s. It points to the significance of the cultural and economic context of turn-of-the-century American Orientalism within which they were able to establish a viable commercial network. Moreover, it reveals different trajectories of migration from the subcontinent—trajectories that South Asians followed through the Southern states and into the economic and cultural orbit of the Caribbean and Central America.

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.

scholarly journals Brown Bodies and Xenophobic Bullying in US Schools: Critical Analysis and Strategies for Action

2016 ◽  
Vol 86 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monisha Bajaj ◽  
Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher ◽  
Karishma Desai
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Hate Crimes ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
Action Project ◽  
Asian American Youth ◽  
Conventional Literature ◽  
Brown Bodies

In this essay, Monisha Bajaj, Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher, and Karishma Desai present an evidence-based action project that seeks to interrupt and transform bullying behaviors directed at South Asian American youth in schools in the United States. In the context of this essay and project, they argue that larger macro-level forces which promote misinformation about youth who inhabit brown bodies have given rise to bullying and, in some cases, harassment and hate crimes in schools. Conventional literature on bullying offers inadequate frames for how the forces of Islamophobia—which affect all those perceived to be Muslim—and bullying come together to shape realities for South Asian American youth in schools. The authors advance new frameworks and strategies for understanding xenophobic and bias-based bullying and explore schools as sites of possibility to interrupt Islamophobia and misinformation about South Asian Americans.

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.

scholarly journals Neighborhood Walkability and Walking for Transport Among South Asians in the MASALA Study

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 514-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Kelley ◽  
Namratha R. Kandula ◽  
Alka M. Kanaya ◽  
Irene H. Yen
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activity ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
South Asians ◽  
The United States ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
Neighborhood Walkability ◽  
Asian Men ◽  
Walk Score

Background:The neighborhood built environment can have a strong influence on physical activity levels, particularly walking for transport. In examining racial/ethnic differences in physical activity, one important and understudied group is South Asians. This study aims to describe the association between neighborhood walkability and walking for transport among South Asian men and women in the United States in the Mediators of Atherosclerosis in South Asians Living in America (MASALA) Study.Methods:A cross-sectional study was conducted in 2014 using the baseline dataset of the MASALA study (N = 906). Mean age was 55 years old and 54% of the sample was male. Weekly minutes spent walking for transport was assessed using a questionnaire adapted from the Cross-Cultural Activity Participation Study. Neighborhood walkability was measured using Walk Score, a composite index of walkability.Results:After adjusting for covariates, with each 10-point increase in Walk Score, South Asian American men engaged in 13 additional minutes per week of walking for transport (P = .008). No association was observed between walkability and walking for transport in South Asian American women.Conclusions:Results provide new evidence for how the effects of environmental influences on walking for transport may vary between South Asian men and women.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document