How to Be South Asian in America: Narratives of Ambivalence and Belonging

Introduction

Introduction How to Be South Asian in America investigates assimilation narratives concerned with the ambivalence engendered when accommodating a shifting (and thus elusive) national ideal. The title phrase “how to be” signals this study’s central goal of demystifying a purportedly authentic or unchanging American cultural identity. It must immediately be acknowledged that “South Asian” is also a category describing a dynamic “imagined community”1 of multifarious peoples connected—as conditionally and as meaningfully as any other imagined community—to the Indian subcontinent, in symbolic ways as well as in relation to capital, technology, and movement back and forth. Over the past four decades, the population of diasporic South Asians in the United States, with historical origins in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka,2 has grown beyond two million. Their communities have thus rather recently3 contributed to American traditions of narrating the nation , a process in which a variety of immigrant groups have participated, admittedly with varied claims to recognized authority. In this book, I look at distinct stories representing the diaspora in the United States which were produced in a shared chronological moment at the turn of the twenty-first century. One of the reasons why studies such as this one are crucial is therefore to update stories of America4 to acknowledge the contributions of those who have more recently immigrated and thereafter added unforeseen nuances to the national mythology. Reappraising assimilation in relation to this group of relatively new Asian immigrants 2 / introduction tells us a great deal about American identities in an age of self-conscious transnationality. Reading interrelated but distinct narratives reveals that newcomers in America will find themselves confronting the stories of those who came before, both the heartening and the horrifying; in relation to such stories as well as those uniquely made available to or claimed by them in their particular time, immigrants navigate their own paths to belonging. In the future, these stories will be tested and may become familiar and beloved ones through repetition, existing alongside or displacing those that have been foundational in the past. For generations after immigration , these stories may seem more or less fitting for representing certain communities and will therefore undergo their own variations. Diversity among immigrants and differential national responses to them, relating to race-ethnicity,5 gender, class,6 diaspora and so forth, produce an array of possibilities for assimilation. The experience of (at least implicitly) having to identify one’s narrative among these possibilities, rather than feeling as if one automatically or innately belongs, is perhaps the only characteristic shared by all American immigrants, across all of their many differences. Paradoxically, this commonality in difference replaces the ethnic sameness that has often been considered a necessary prerequisite for “nation.” The sense of renewal represented by repeated cycles of immigration and thus “Americanization” —as I discuss later in this chapter, a term which is used throughout the study to designate complex sets of phenomena rather than whole-scale assimilation—means that processes of belonging are ongoing rather than reaching a conclusion after which there is no more story to be told. The most useful way to read such narratives is not for an anticipated outcome or plot resolution but instead for the style in which they convey meaning. Most readers would probably agree that stories both reflect and shape our realities; tracing how such a process works in discrete contexts and with what implications is one of the main tasks of this book. Treating fictional as well as “factual” contexts emphasizes that there is a constant interplay between imagined and lived possibilities, as narratives of belonging concerning history, community, and subjectivity influence one another. How belonging is allocated both materially and imaginatively has serious consequences for individuals and entire communities. Probing the layers of meaning produced through these intersecting stories about contemporary affiliation results in an expanded vision of what it means to be American today . Given dominant symbolism of America, this effort implicates issues introduction / 3 such as freedom, democracy, and invention; since my focus on transnationalism complicates exceptionalist narratives of the United States, it has the potential to expose otherwise disguised motivations of power and capital, laying the groundwork for rethinking national assimilation as a more open-ended and therefore adequately flexible process. With these priorities, a study such as this is implicitly concerned with diversity as an important element of social justice. Another way in which this...