Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City (review)

Discussions about American immigration, ethnicity, and youth culture have paid little attention to South Asians. In Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City, Sunaina Marr Maira addresses this oversight, focusing on issues of performance and identity. Her book explores the party scene on campuses and in clubs with an eye to how youth articulate contradictory visions of ethnic authenticity in relation to experiences of gender, class, and race.

Maira's central argument revolves around demonstrating how the children of Indian and to some extent other South Asian immigrants negotiate what she calls a "politics of cool" with a collective nostalgia for India. The "cool" quotient involves bhangra remix music, defined narrowly as "Indian folk music mixed with American dance music and produced by Indian American deejays" (12). Maira focuses on the meaning of music, dance, and style, arguing that what is produced on the club floor is a gendered Indian American subjectivity. Ironically, this creative move towards hybrid innovation is accompanied by nostalgia for a traditional India. Maira explores the internal contradictions of this nostalgia in looking at a range of young people's experiences, from their travel to India to the ways in which they define and perform "tradition" at college cultural shows. Her approach effectively combines ethnographic interviews with the interdisciplinary theorizing of cultural studies, although closer readings of specific events would have provided better context for her argument.

Maira demonstrates in Chapter 2 how youth produce their version of "hip" from a repertoire of transnational elements, including music and "Indo-chic" fashion. She avoids celebrating hybridity by highlighting the homophobia, masculine violence, and patriarchal gender expectations that permeate this subcultural sphere. In conversation with the work of Vijay Prasad (2000) on South Asian racism and Afro-Asian cooperation, she discusses how the consumption of hip-hop style reveals a desire to possess the "subcultural capital" of youth of color, and an anxiety about class mobility and generational alienation. Maira is savvy enough to realize that the appropriation of black style has different meanings for youth depending upon their racial and class locations. She concludes that for South Asian Americans, like other Asian American youth, an emphasis on ethnic identity is a response to their position of racial ambiguity and involves both a move away from and towards solidarity with African Americans.

In chapter 3, Maira examines how youth mark the boundaries that define an authentic Indian American. Maira concludes that Indian American identity is not liberatory, as it sets up new "structures of authority" along the lines of who is "truly" Indian. Moreover, many youth develop an exclusive view of India, favoring Hindu rituals and cultural and linguistic skills over the discussion of social issues. Maira's exploration of how religious nationalism sits uneasily with American multiculturalism provides new insights into the transnational phenomenon of Hindu extremism.

The South Asian cultural shows at universities are contexts "where the performance of 'tradition' both brings it closer to 'home' and calls attention to itself as a theatrical moment removed from daily life" (119). Maira's performance material overlaps with Sunita Mukhi's in Doing the Desi Thing (2000), but is more rigorously theorized. Discussing how particular ideas about Indian "tradition" share the stage with the hybrid pop culture of remix music and dance, she underscores the contradictions of identity. Paradoxically, Hindi film sequences, reproduced onstage in perfect detail, represent traditional and untainted Indian culture, even though the music and dances are clearly the product of transnational pop cultural influences. It would have been interesting at this point for Maira to examine the behind-the-scenes processes through which such elements are selected and rehearsed for the shows.

Throughout the book, Maira reminds readers that gender colors the experience of ethnic identity. Women's bodies, for both parents and peers, symbolize the discourse that pits chaste tradition against...