How to be South Asian in America: Narratives of Ambivalence and Belonging by Anupama Jain (review)

In How to Be South Asian in America, Anupama Jain provides an impressive accounting of scholarly literature on diasporic identity and assimilation, attentive readings of South Asian American novels and films, and a model for new directions in the interdisciplinary field of “Asian American postcolonial feminist cultural studies” (14). The book centers on South Asian immigrant “reckoning[s]” with the American Dream, a myth that continues to serve as the stick by which we measure immigrant “success” and belonging (24). Jain argues that by reading the often contradictory narratives of various constituencies (post-1965 immigrants, Indo-Caribbeans, and second-generation Indian Americans) we can see that far from being an agreed upon and achievable goal, the American Dream is a roughly hued landscape that has the potential to be resurfaced and reimagined by successive immigrant groups. Jain calls this process of Americanization, “one among a globalized set of processes representing how people negotiate being part of a collective” (12). Americanization, the term she prefers to the essentialist and unidirectional “assimilation,” “reflect[s] the evolving cultural and material investments of different constituencies” (12). This definition encapsulates the book’s four key thrusts: 1) an insistence on reading Americanization transnationally, 2) a consideration of the symbolic side-by-side with the material, 3) an attention to the politics of belonging as “a universal experience” (228), and 4) the utilization of ambivalence as a lever to expose the multiple and contradictory allegiances, desires, and narratives of South Asian immigrants in the U.S.

Americanization’s transnational, figurative, and material nature are well-theorized in the introduction and first chapter, “Reading Assimilation and the American Dream as Transnational Narratives,” and actualized in chapter 2, an original ethnography of Indo-Guyanese immigrants who were actively courted by Schenectady city officials during the last decade. Nevertheless, these strands are somewhat unevenly developed throughout the rest of the book. In chapter 3, “South Asian Novels of Americanization,” and chapter 4, “Independent Films about Second-Generation South Asian Americans,” Jain reads the novels of Meena Alexander, Bharati Mukherjee, and Bapsi Sidwha, along with the spate of Indian American identity films from around the turn of this century. On one hand, in their antecedence to or silence about momentous shifts in geopolitics (9/11 and the “War on Terror,” India’s rising status, “reverse migration” trends), these texts do not offer sufficient material to make a strong case for their immediate relevance in an age of securitization and globalization. On the other hand, they do allow Jain to pay close attention to how subjects negotiate multiple national, community, and familial imperatives to assimilate and maintain authenticity with their own ambitions for self-actualization, economic security, and a sense of belonging in a more general sense. She proves herself a skillful and attentive reader, able to bring theoretical insights to bear on the texts, but also able to bring forth the texts’ own ambivalent, fraught, mundane, and at times joyous conclusions about the necessity of Americanization.

This ethic of reading and her groundbreaking work on recently arrived and working-class Indian immigrants from Guyana are Jain’s most significant interventions. Postcolonial scholars have tended to privilege a politicized definition of diaspora that utilizes diasporic narratives to challenge hegemonic ideologies of nation, racial essentialism, and cultural identity (37–38). In this clear preference for anti-hegemonic gestures, progressive discussions of diaspora tend toward the prescriptive rather than descriptive, often castigating texts and authors who do not sufficiently exemplify the scholar’s politics (32). Jain very consciously refuses to make such judgments. Assimilation is redefined and then taken seriously within the context of often paradoxical attempts to make a life for oneself in America.