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>> 375 Afterword Vijay Prashad On a snowy evening in December 1994, I got some good news. My PhD done, I was working as a community organizer at Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE) in Providence, Rhode Island. It was fantastic work, giving me an opportunity to join the contingent classes of late twentieth-century America in some of our fiercest fights. Police brutality was high on the agenda, but so too was the attempt by home day care providers for union cover. But it was also tiring work, with little time left in the day for reading. I missed the solitary timelessness of reading—something that I enjoyed when I just got to graduate school, and that I really cherished when I was doing my field research in India. The phone call came from Professor Susanne Rudolph of the University of Chicago, where I had taken my degree. Susanne had an unusual request. Cornell and Syracuse had won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to offer Indian history. They had hired a person who quit at the last minute, and the term was to begin in a few weeks. They needed a replacement. But the real question was this: Could I drive, and did I have a car? I would have to teach one class each at both schools. Compared with my salary in Providence, Cornell-Syracuse would pay a king’s ransom. DARE let me off the hook for four months, and I arrived in Ithaca for my onetime gig. As I got settled into McGraw Hall, I met one of my neighbors. In the thick of winter he wore a Hawaiian shirt and a friendly smile. It turned out that Gary Okihiro was the head of the Asian American Studies Program , and casually he asked me if I would like to teach a class on the South Asian diaspora. Apparently there had been requests for such a class from the undergraduates, but there was no one able to do such a course. I trained as a historian and anthropologist of India, so I had no expertise. However, I had lived in the United States since my late teens, 376 > 377 narcissism, but hunger. They sought a framework to understand their lives in a land that had not yet made sense of them (which means that it had not yet fully figured out how to dismiss them). In 1995 and 1996, a group of us organized panels at the South Asian studies conference in Madison on themes of diaspora, but with an emphasis on the political orientation of Indian Americans. The issue at hand was the rise of the Hindu Right within the United States, and its funding connection to the Hindu Right in India. These were perilous times. Little original research on history took place there, largely because most of us were impacted by the violence in India in 1992–1993, after the destruction of a sixteenth-century mosque at Ayodhya. In May 1996, Biju Mathew and I organized a roundtable discussion at the Association of Asian American Studies conference titled “South Asian American Identity .” A group began to form: people like Sunaina Maira, Rajini Srikanth, S. Shankar, Kamala Visveswaran, Ali Mir, Raza Mir, and others. Most of us were born and raised in South Asia, having come to the United States for college or in the late years of our high school education. We had no numerical generation to count as our own (neither properly first generation , in other words, the highly skilled scientists of the post-1965 era, nor second generation, in other words, the children of those skilled professionals ). Mutterings of marginality at these conferences always irritated me. No sense in being annoyed if you don’t try to seize the space, and in particular, if the space is not being actively reserved against you. So, we took the space and created room for South Asian American thinking within the institutions of South Asian studies and Asian American studies . Sunaina was doing her doctoral work at Harvard’s School of Education on South Asian youth in New York City. She was the only one in our group with proper credentials. The rest of us were amateurs. Three volumes came out of our early experimentation: a special issue of Amerasia Journal entitled “Satyagraha in America: The Political Culture of South Asian Americans” (1999–2000), an academic collection on the place of South Asians in Asian America (A Part, Yet Apart, 1998) and the awardwinning...

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