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  • Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture by Vanita Reddy
  • Suzanne Enzerink
Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture, by Vanita Reddy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016. Xiii + 261 pp. $84.50 cloth. $32.95 paper. ISBN: 978-1-4399-1155-6.

A few years ago, a friend sent me a card so striking that it is still up on my wall today. Taken from Canadian visual artist Meera Sethi's series Firangi Rang Barangi, Hindi for "colorful stranger," the card ("Pyaari") features a woman dressed in a bright green floral headscarf, a sari blouse, geometrically patterned blue pants, bright orange pumps, and a mix of jewelry all over her body. More accurately, the card depicts the clothing itself: the woman is visible only as a trace outline. Fashion here emerges not as adornment, but as constitutive of identity. In this case, the sartorial reveals a distinctly hybrid sense of self, a combination of North American sensibilities with Indian fabrics and adornments. It is fitting that Vanita Reddy's excellent new book, Fashioning Diaspora, takes another of Sethi's prints ("Jaan") as its cover. The book traces transnational itineraries of Indian beauty, especially as it emerges in U.S. cultural imaginaries and diasporic formations. Just as Sethi does through her art, Reddy looks at beauty and fashion as wielding material and affective force, as opening up intimacies and affiliations that can put pressure on normative notions of belonging.

Fashioning Diaspora opens with a spectacular moment of racial formation and such contested belonging. After Nina Davuluri was crowned Miss America in 2013, the first Indian American woman to win the competition, a fierce debate erupted that sought to both interpret her win within the U.S. racial landscape and situate her within larger diasporic framework of Indian beauty. She was both claimed as American and derided as a perpetual foreigner, celebrated as reflective of India's prominence in beauty and upheld to critique its investment in whiteness. From this starting point, Reddy compellingly outlines how episodes like this are both "symptom and provocation" of much larger forces—beauty, fashion, race, diaspora, femininity—whose interactions shape South Asian American cultural forms (4). Beauty, in particular, generates [End Page 467] emergent forms of belonging that transcend class and generational divides, and that draw on the aesthetic to address raced and gendered practices within the nation and the diaspora.

Reddy posits that beauty, while often figured as commodity or commodifying (of women), more importantly needs to be understood as intimately tied to the social, as a force with material effects. As part of this focus on the material, the actual women that are so often elided in narratives of Indian beauty are brought into focus by Reddy. As she writes, circulations of Indian beauty in mass media "are not merely images but also embodied and desiring subjects, bodies with flesh and bones" (12). However, rather than through ethnography, Reddy effectively and engagingly tends to this by tracing what beauty does. Beauty (and in the second half of the book, fashion) functions as a social domain, constitutive of diasporic embodiments that challenge neoliberal forms of belonging. For diasporic subjects, "the practices associated with beauty are socializing in the way that they make possible new racialized subject formations, affiliations, and forms of diasporic belonging" (17).

Reddy mines an exciting and diverse archive to show how such attachments, and South Asian racial and cultural formations, come into being. Her first three chapters hone in on literary productions, both by canonical authors like Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri and lesser-known figures like Palavi Dixit. Her final two chapters take up the visual field in which beauty and fashion operate. Chapter 4 examines experimental feminist art that constitutes "oppositional visual economies of fashion," using parody and aesthetic play to resignify markers such as the bindi (141), while the final chapter reads Shailja Patel's 2006 performance art piece Migritude. Part of what is so exciting about the book is exactly this reading together of texts that cross genres and political and theoretical leanings. Lahiri's "feminist cosmopolitics" are not Mukherjee's racial and gendered exceptionalism, though both push against the terms of...

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