Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City (review)

Sunaina Maira's Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City, begins with the story of Radhika, a young woman at Hunter College in New York City, who struggles with the labels she has available to identify herself ethnically and culturally: American with an Indian cultural background, Indian American, and Indian, among others. Radhika, upon taking a course in ethnic studies, begins to reflect consciously on how her identity is shaped by factors of race, culture, gender, and class. Specifically, she addresses how her identity manifests itself in problematic and complex ways in her daily choices and life.

Radhika's story is representative of the focus that Maira's work takes. Desis in the House offers a study of South Asian second-generation children of post-1965 immigrants in New York City through analysis of the formations and developments in youth culture in New York City in the 1990s. The groundbreaking chapters that constitute the book include one that investigates constructions of ethnic identity through an examination of Indian "Bhangra Remix" music parties that gained popularity in metropolitan cities with a large South Asian youth and young adult population. Maira deftly combines her observations and interviews about the second generation club scene and the ethnically exclusive Bhangra Remix parties to complicate theories of second generation identity formation. In so doing, she illuminates the multiple meanings youth make of their cultural identity and shows how these meanings are acted out at social functions and gatherings. Maira argues that this negotiation of multiplicity is enacted through gendered performances of what she terms "cultural nostalgia" and "coolness" by second generation youth by the creation of music, fashion, and gendered behavior at various cultural gatherings. According to Maira, cultural nostalgia as both performance and feeling is influenced by childhood experiences of being seen as an outsider as well as by college experiences of being part of a large group (ethnic community) with similar feelings. Maira combines ethnographic research with insights from theories of cultural anthropology and cultural studies in this engaging interdisciplinary study. This study distinctly furthers the work of ethnic, diaspora, and cultural studies by documenting and theorizing the second generation youth's understanding of their own position as complex participants and creators of cultural identity.

The first section of the book considers how Indian American youth insert themselves into a racialized landscape that is popularly conceived as black and white. Especially noteworthy here is Maira's discussion of Asian Indian masculinity and the relation of its expression to the appeal and the production of hip-hop performance and music. Maira points out that the move towards "machismo" is also a racialized project in "that the youth are consciously affiliating themselves (one way or the other) with the racial stratification of the binary poles of black or white" (66). This action may ultimately be viewed in two ways: 1) Asian Indians are mediators in the black/white binary; and/or, 2) youth identify as "youth of color" and reject the status quo of the racial system. Remix youth culture is characterized as constituted by "sampling sounds and styles of hip-hop and therefore is an overt expression of ethnicity" (67), which forms in response to the racially ambiguous position of Indians and Asian Americans in the dominant black/white paradigm of race relations. And yet, as Maira asserts, Bhangra Remix adapts black cultural forms in an exclusive ethnic desi space which is different from Indian cultural shows that feature "Indian" forms in an ethnic space (69). Thus Remix represents a third strategy that simultaneously distances youth from and yet also affiliates them with Black American culture in the process of enacting their own cultural and racialized experiences.

The central section of the book develops the foundations of Maira's theory of cultural nostalgia in relation to identity formation. She...