New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the US (Asian America) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080475280X ISBN 13: 9780804752800

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2006

Synopsis

This book argues that South Asians in the United States must be understood as a people who constantly move between two or more cultures, places, languages, and societies, thanks to technology, travel, and globalization.

About this title

About the Author

Gita Rajan is James Watson Irwin Visiting Professor of Women's Studies at Hamilton College and Associate Professor at Fairfield University. Shailja Sharma is Associate Professor of English at DePaul University.

From the Back Cover

This book offers an in-depth look at the ways in which technology, travel, and globalization have altered traditional patterns of immigration for South Asians who live and work in the United States, and explains how their popular cultural practices and aesthetic desires are fulfilled. They are presented as the twenty-first century's "new cosmopolitans" flexible enough to adjust to globalization's economic, political, and cultural imperatives. They are thus uniquely adaptable to the mainstream cultures of the United States, but also vulnerable in a period when nationalism and security have become tools to maintain traditional power relations in a changing world.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

New Cosmopolitanisms

SOUTH ASIANS IN THE US

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5280-0

Contents

Acknowledgements.....................................................................................................................................ixContributors.........................................................................................................................................xi1 New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the United States at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma.....................12 The Pakistani Diaspora in North America Iftikhar Dadi.............................................................................................373 Identity and Visibility: Reflections on Museum Displays of South Asian Art Vidya Dehejia..........................................................714 South Asian Religions in the United States: New Contexts and Configurations Karen Leonard.........................................................915 Bollywood Abroad: South Asian Diasporic Cosmopolitanism and Indian Cinema Jigna Desai.............................................................1156 The Psychological Cost of New Cosmopolitanism: Eating Disorders in the Context of Globalization Dana S. Iyer and Nick Haslam......................1387 Theorizing Recognition: South Asian Authors in a Global Milieu Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma......................................................150Index................................................................................................................................................171

Chapter One

New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the United States at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

GITA RAJAN AND SHAILJA SHARMA

Introduction and Definitions

Institutional markers of a sub-discipline: journals, the naming of -isms or academic categorizations as studies, the rise of model scholars to act as voices of that branch of knowledge have been some traditional, academic ways to broach subjectivities and their constructions. In this collection we explore and discuss the meaning of a new kind of subject construction informed by globalization-the new cosmopolitan subject-and all that it entails in life experiences for South Asians within the nation-space of the United States. For over a decade now, diasporic and postcolonial subject constructions have been studied at the nodes and intersections of newer forces such as globalization and cosmopolitanism. In the social sciences, migration experts guarded their scientific turf through statistical and empirical ethnography, and used theories of nationalism and world systems to explain globalization. In the humanities, this line of questioning has largely been pursued through tropes of cultural identity, porous national borders, and revived fervors of nationalism. Broadly speaking, scholars in both the social sciences and the humanities locate their inquiries into the globalized subject and the processes of globalization, the intersections of technology, travel, and labor, and the privileges/deprivations of citizens within the sphere of cosmopolitan modernity. It is time to reexamine the relationship of diasporas and the globalized, networked world in light of the dialogues presented for a decade almost in Public Culture and Diaspora, and following the rapid applicability of British Cultural Studies to almost any subject, but especially globalization, as indicated by debates around the many articles in Theory, Culture and Society.

As part of that project, our aim is not to examine discrete, bounded, and finite diaspora groups settled in the United States as much as it is to look at what we call New Cosmopolitanism. By using this term, we want to signal its difference from traditional diasporas so as to locate that new cosmopolitanism in a contemporary formation that results from the confluence of globalization (trade, migration, media, money, and culture), but also indicate its affiliations to traditional diasporic formations. We use the adjective "new" to distinguish it from the historical uses of the term cosmopolitanism, even though in some respects the new partakes of the historical meanings, especially in its links to privilege. As Brennan defines it, cosmopolitanism is an ambivalent phenomenon, both in its imperial incarnation, and in its ethical dimension. Its ambivalence is grounded in national-imperial (in Brennan's discussion, often the United States) sentiments whose boundaries complicate the aspiration to world citizenship. However, our argument posits the new cosmopolitan subject as precisely not being grounded in a nation-state or in a class (intellectual or working class). She instead occupies a range of fluid subject positions, which can be trans-class, trans-local with competing value systems. For example, a new cosmopolitan subject could be a gay South Asian-American activist, a store owner, or a filmmaker, all enacting a range of new and changing subject positions. Consequently, we want to examine the ground that South Asians inhabit, ranging from the older immigrants to the newer ones, across first, second, and third generation populations whose life styles and life choices reveal an interesting blend of diasporic and cosmopolitan traits.

Theorists of traditional diasporas like Robin Cohen, Khachig Tllyan, and Safran, have posited diasporas as stable, fixed populations. Though consisting of people displaced through choice, violence, trade, or imperialism, they nevertheless are bounded both in space (at a distance from their homeland), and through their bipolar relationships to the homeland. However, we define new cosmopolitans as people who blur the edges of home and abroad by continuously moving physically, culturally, and socially, and by selectively using globalized forms of travel, communication, languages, and technology to position themselves in motion between at least two homes, sometimes even through dual forms of citizenship, but always in multiple locations (through travel, or through cultural, racial, or linguistic modalities). It is these new forms of shifting choices and complex relationships that emerge from what were earlier "knowable" as diasporas that we call new cosmopolitanism. In a kind of shorthand, one could call them diasporas in motion, where motion could be physical, cultural, ideological; motion, moreover of people or by capital, technology, media forms, or culture. It is necessary to repeat, but also mark entities such as technology, media, and culture, for example, because these are the momentary and fragmentary locations that people inhabit in our rapidly globalizing world. New cosmopolitanism thus creates and defines itself by occupying in-between spaces of identity, culture, and communication, spurning fissures both along the lines of ethnic nationalism as well as the old assimilative logic of host cultures. One way of understanding this class of people may be through the metaphor popularized by Manuel Castells of the "network" that describes the newest form of globalization (Castells 1996).

These networks are mutable and linked to contemporary manifestations of globalization, constructed in the shifting space between older definitions of diaspora and traditional cosmopolitanism. Our present inquiry into this class of people called new cosmopolitans rests upon the work of immigration historians and cultural critics (Appadurai, Robertson, Rouse, Scholte, and Bauman). In addition to Roger Rouse's study of Mexican immigration through "transnational social spaces," also pertinent here is Bill Ong Hing's Making And Remaking Asian America Through Immigration policy: 1850-1990, which looks at the influx of Asians into the United States. In this critical anthology we define new cosmopolitanism as a set of practices linked to migration and globalization, distinct from earlier theories of diaspora and its transnational cultural formulations and affiliations. This new cosmopolitanism is marked by both elitist, highly educated, technologically driven, and a politically conservative population, which seeks to intervene in both the country of settlement and in the homeland equally, and by an increasing number of the working class, that is, with little education, with more liberal political views, and a marked interest in transnational popular cultural forms like Bollywood. This other group of South Asians, moreover, also includes people who form an expendable workforce, who have no political access to citizenship, but occupy nonetheless, the hybridized, overdetermined, multicultural, and multiracial spaces of urban America. The difference between the historical use of the term "cosmopolitanism" and the new one we posit lies in the particular nature of the current conjuncture. We examine how the globalization of capital and travel have worked to create a growing class of immigrants whose modalities of migration and settlement overturn older ways of thinking about home and abroad (for example in the United States, this middle to upper class consumer has an easier access to the materiality of homeland culture via foods, places of worship, etc.), as well as its accompanying high and mass cultural practices.

Our particular focus is the South Asian population in the United States in this contemporary conjuncture, which defines itself as somewhere between traditionally diasporic and a cosmopolitan floating class of people selling its skills to the highest bidder in the global marketplace. The term South Asian is both widely used but is also problematic because the region comprises at least six countries-India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan-that do not identify themselves as a bloc, and are in fact riven by political rivalries and religious-political tensions. Nevertheless, given the shared histories, language, and culture among them, the patterns they have unwittingly formed in settling alongside each other in the United States, and how this proximity and their perceived racial difference from other Asian Americans has made "South Asian" an accepted and acceptable nomenclature, we find it appropriate to use the term even as we recognize its imprecise nature. Thus, although the United States census or demographic data has no category called "South Asian," we choose to employ this self-reflexive term because of its regional-cultural specificity. Most often, the term is used in conjunction with, or in place of Indian-Pakistani, or to denote people of the Indian subcontinent generally. It is this population and its cultural affiliations and habits that we examine under the phenomenon of a new cosmopolitanism in scholarly discourses and from within public and media representations.

Our second caveat in examining this phenomenon has to do with class and how, in turn, class is read with regard to South Asians in the United States. Traditionally, the post-1965 migration of South Asians to the United States has been selectively read as predominantly being a highly educated, "middle class," partially assimilated, population (Prashad 2000). However, this elides both the complexity and variety across the class spectrum that marks South Asian migration and ignores their uneven placement and assimilation within US society. And, such a characterization obscures their similarity to other Third World elites who entered the United States after 1965. In terms of class and new cosmopolitanism, we argue that since new cosmopolitanism is a network of relations between home and abroad, native and diasporic, it allows different classes to partake in it at different levels. In other words, the term new cosmopolitanism does not privilege one class over the other, even though the word "cosmopolitanism" has traditionally evoked an lite, transnational connotation. Although we interrogate the automatic association of cosmopolitanism with class privilege in terms of historical linkages, we do recognize that the term itself slides among many different meanings ranging from Kantian, to Marxist, and our contemporary one in usage.

A critique of this litist and less than progressive sense of cosmopolitanism is apparent in the work of many scholars, most prominently that of Timothy Brennan. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (1997) examines not just historical and contemporary cosmopolitanism, but also its connections to imperial and postcolonial cultural production. He pitches his critique of cosmopolitanism as a double-sided term, which offers both a vision of world citizenship and is a category that avoids "class historical engagement" (p. 31) by simultaneously embracing a language of authenticity and hybridity. This applies particularly to the case of South Asians in the United States because they have been progressively studied as diasporic, and sometimes as exilic and/or migrant (voluntary or enforced), viewed as postcolonial, then as urban and cosmopolitan, and now as a group occupying the problematic spaces created by globalization.

The late 1990s saw a sudden visibility of South Asians in technology, finance, around discussions of native versus foreign labor, as well as in cultural fields of cinema and popular music. This mini-phenomenon of the perceptible presence of South Asians waned with the concomitant bust. However, this phenomenon highlighted the somewhat anomalous way in which South Asians inserted themselves into American culture and its economy, even as it brought to the fore contradictory nationalist impulses in the United States about the relationship of globalization and technology, particularly now as India becomes the focus of the outsourcing furor. Therefore, although our use of the term cosmopolitanism is historically charged, particularly in its connotations of class, (Kant's cosmopolitan was a traveler, but never a worker, and the Soviet cosmopolitan was never a fellow traveler), it denotes the educated, worldly, highly mobile population that has made San Jose, Houston, Boston, and New Jersey its home. Yet, the positions of sanctioned and privileged visibility of these South Asians exist in tandem with the neo-orientalist constructions of South Asians in US terrains of academic and popular culture. This can be seen for example, in the academic presentations and publications about Bollywood or the large numbers of literary works by/about South Asians, and more visibly in how Apu from The Simpsons coexists with the high-profile role of Parminder Nagra (of Bend it Like Beckham fame) as Neela Rasgotra on ER, or the glamorous hype surrounding the rich nuptial scene in Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding.

Such a multilayered presence of South Asians is one of the legacies of history because South Asia has occupied a clichd (exotic) and somewhat obscure place on the fringes of American culture. But, South Asians have also occupied invisible identities as doctors and engineers that blended into majority cultures of the United States. These exoticized and benign framings havealsocoexisted,particularlyintheUnitedStates,withimagesandrhetoric of South Asian abject poverty and failed socialism. Paradoxically, the media's crisis mode of presenting this latter image of South Asia has changed in the last decade, as South Asians found themselves being reinserted hurriedly, incompletely, and in many ways, questionably, into this New World Order. The rapid realignment of global economies, the frenzied hunt for technology workers, and the visible shift in cultural hegemonies from center to margin (and sometimes margin to center) has brought South Asia and its diaspora into a visibility unprecedented since the 1950s, when it served as a test case for postcolonial modernity. Silicon Valley is the most visible location of both the actual labor and the tangible wealth of this new tech-driven immigration. Other,equallyimportantbutlessvisiblevarietiesofSouthAsianlaborinclude students, artists, priests, intellectuals, economists, managers, stockbrokers, taxi drivers, and small shopkeepers. And yet, their apparent success is fraught with complex contradictions surrounding privilege, education, and the two-way flow of labor, culture, and capital. It is this range of class and educational backgrounds that remains obscured in most public representations of South Asians now living in the United States.

How do we understand this movement of South Asians to the United States as linked to other parts of the globe? Does it provide us with a model for decoding the place human capital plays within the rearticulation of global economy? Do the rapid transfer, amalgamation, and reformulation of people and culture offer us a new perspective of the citizen-subject? Does such a citizen-status allow us to redefine traditional ways of understanding the nation-state and transnationalism to look at people beyond their political profile as citizens to their cultural role as new cosmopolitans? Do the scale and speed of the recent waves of immigration mean that this group is anomalous? That is to say, is there a difference between traditional migrants and the new cosmopolitans, because not all migrants are cosmopolitans? How can we read these South Asian presences within popular and public culture as embedded within the nation, that is, are they part of a national culture-however haphazardly multicultural it is-instead of harking back to diasporic nostalgia? And finally, what are the shifting relationships between class and privilege that account for this group's success, which coexists with a level of invisibility? These questions serve as a heuristic device to examine the presence and life-conditions of South Asians in the United States, and allow us to define the meaning of new cosmopolitanism.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080475280X
• ISBN 13: 9780804752800
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: Rajan Gita, Sharma Shailja