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  • Indians in North Carolina:Race, Class, and Culture in the Making of Immigrant Identity
  • Ajantha Subramanian

Over the past thirty years, North Carolina has refashioned itself as a center of transnational, "high-tech" industry. The changing landscape of the State has been witnessed in the in-migration of new, white-collar populations attracted by employment opportunities in the State's Research Triangle Park (RTP), the proliferation of gated communities for these "knowledge workers," and the further marginalization of poor black and white residents. My work documents the insertion of professional immigrants from India — the beneficiaries of the Indian state's investment in science and technology education — into the race and class dynamics of North Carolina, and examines their role in integrating the State into transnational circuits of culture and capital. This multi-sited ethnography covers the institutional contexts in India where the transnational class of professionals is produced, and the community and professional spaces inhabited by Indian Americans in North Carolina. How has the goal of technological modernity shaped the political economy of development in India and the U.S.? How has North Carolina's transformation into a center of "high tech" industry been reflected spatially and demographically? What role have Indian professionals played in this transformation? And how have North Carolina's Indians situated themselves in the changing race and class dynamics of a region increasingly more tightly integrated into transnational circuits of labor and capital?

In her book Flexible Citizenship, Aihwa Ong urges us to pursue an ethnographic approach to understanding "how nation-states articulate with capitalism in late modernity." She suggests that we go beyond a zero-sum account of the battle between nation-state and capital and attend to "the transnational practices and imaginings of the nomadic subject and the social conditions that enable his flexibility" (1999: 3). Only by weaving the analysis of political economy and of cultural politics, she maintains, "can we hope to provide a nuanced delineation of the complex relations between transnational phenomena, national regimes, and cultural practices in late modernity" (1999: 16). Following her lead, I have begun to explore both the social conditions (state developmental priorities, corporate demand for labor, geopolitics) that have enabled the mobility of Indian professionals and how Indian migrants have constituted themselves socially, culturally, and politically in a new, First World home. The lives and narratives of Indian transnationals help me juxtapose the developmental strategies of the Indian and U.S. states over the latter half of the 20th century, and the operations of social hierarchy and status in both national contexts in ways that will hopefully illuminate some of the nuances of globalization.

Rethinking Diaspora

One of the theoretical goals of this project is to rethink the relevance of diaspora as an analytical tool for documenting the lives of transnational subjects. Are we better off thinking of Indian Americans, for instance, as diasporic Indians or as people moving from one context of unequal power to another? One reason for questioning the use of diaspora is the term's assumption of an original or organic cultural identity that, through movement, is then "hybridized" with other cultural elements. In evoking a place from which movement originates, diaspora creates a singular homeland that then becomes the site of an originary cultural identity. Land and culture are thus conflated, and the movement "away" from the land necessarily becomes a displacement from a pure or authentic cultural identity. By extension, diasporic consciousness is characterized by a yearning for a lost center and an anxiety over loss of cultural purity. Diaspora thus maintains the notion of cultural wholes, indeed even of national cultures, that have been soundly and rightly critiqued by anthropology (cf. Fox 1990). For me, to move beyond diaspora (so to speak) is to give up using "Indianness" as a referent for assessing cultural change and to turn instead to a more contextualized approach to cultural identity. It is to understand subjectivity in terms of the situated practices of people in specific locales. For the purposes of this study, then, I document the imaginings and practices of North Carolina's Indian Americans not in terms of continuity or change from an original, pre-migration cultural identity but as...

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