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--------------Emigrants Twice Displaced Race, Color, and Identity in Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala Binita Mehta The relationship between nonwhite minority groups in the United States today is an issue that requires our immediate attention. To recognize the gravity of the situation, one has only to look at such disputes in Brooklyn as the 1990 black boycott of two Korean grocery stores, and the clashes between the Hasidic and African American communities in the Crown Heights neighborhood . The much publiCized April 1992 riot in South Central Los Angeles following the Rodney King verdict was not simply a black versus white incident but one that involved members of African American, Korean American, and Latino communities. Peter Kwong explains the complex nature of the violence in "The First Multicultural Riots": "The fixation on black versus white is outdated and misleading-the Rodney King verdict was merely the match that lit the fuse of the first multiracial class riot in American history." Many Korean American stores located in KoreatoWll, north of South Central Los Angeles, were looted and burned down by Latino, mostly Central American, immigrants who lived in the area. The Korean American community was mobilized by the riots and "came to see themselves-for the first time-as victims of white racism" when neither the local nor state police came to their aid.1 With the influx of immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean to the United States, American society has become more complex. The black/white dichotomy no longer prOvides an analytical model for the problematics ofrace, color, and identity. Many historians and cultural critics.recognize the need for new coalitions, especially among marginalized communities and peoples ofcolor. Manning Marable speaks ofa new stage ofblack freedom in the United States that no longer involves only blacks but includes all people 186 Binita Mehta of color: "We must find new room for our identity as people of color to include other oppressed national minorities-Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Asian/ Pacific Americans, Native Americans, and other people of African descent."2 Taking a broader perspective, philosopher and theologian Cornel West expresses the need for unity between different groups of people-regardless of race, class, gender, or sexuality-while maintaining individual identity. The new cultural politics of difference "affirms the perennial quest for the precious ideals ofindividuality and democracy by digging deep in the depths of human particularities and social specificities in order to construct new kinds of connections ' affinities and communities across empire, nation, region, race, gender , age and sexual orientation."3 Like Marable and West, Edward Said suggests that binary oppositions rooted in imperialism have disappeared and that "new alignments made across borders, types, nations, and essences" have challenged the notion of identity: "Just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities."4 Contemporary debates on race and color in the United States must necessarily include relations between nonwhite minorities. In her 1991 film Mississippi Masala, s Mira Nair depicts the complex relations between two nonwhite minorities in the United States, the Indian and the African American, prompting a reflection on issues ofrace, color, and identity.6 The Indian family depicted in Mississippi Masala has migrated via England from Uganda, East Africa, to Greenwood, Mississippi. Expelled from Uganda by General Idi Amin in 1972, they are twice displaced: Indians by culture and tradition , Ugandan by birth, they move to the United States to live in a motel owned by relatives, themselves immigrants from India. The narrative includes many vignettes about the family's social and cultural adjustments in a small southern town, but the main thrust of the film is the violent opposition of the parents, father Jay (Roshan Seth) and mother Kinnu (Sharmila Tagore), to the relationship oftheir daughter Mina (Sarita Choudhury) with Demetrius (Denzel Washington ), an African American who owns a rug-cleaning business. Mina and Demetrius's relationship brings to the surface the prejudices of the extended Indian family toward African Americans, rendered particularly poignant by the fact that they are both minority communities in Greenwood, as well as by their peculiar status with respect to the white community. Preceding a detailed analysis of the film, some background information about Ugandan Indians is in order.? Mercantile and commercial ties between the East African coast and India date back a thousand years, when Indian merchants lived in Zanzibar and traders from Karachi and Bombay did business regularly with Madagascar. Soon the Indians moved inland, and by 1900 they "controlled wholesale trade along...

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