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Diaspora 8:2 1999 From Multiculture to Polyculture in South Asian American Studies1 Vijay Prashad Trinity College, Hartford, CT A Patchwork Shawl: Chronicles ofSouth Asian Women in America. Ed. Shamita Das Dasgupta. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. The South Asian Americans. Karen Leonard. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. In 1997, Contours ofthe Heart: South Asians Map North America won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (Maira and Srikanth). This was unexpected, not because of the quality of the book, but principally because of the little attention hitherto given to those who write about the "new immigrants" of the Americas (including South Asians, Filipinos, Southeast Asians, Africans, and West Asians). Prior to 1997, scholars and writers of South Asian America had been known to skulk in the halls of even such marginal events as the Asian American Studies Association and complain about the slight presence of South Asian American panels. That complaint can now be put to rest. At each Asian American Studies Association meeting, there are a host of speakers who dwell on the complexities of South Asian American life. The winter 1999-2000 issue ofAmerasia Journal, the respected leader in the field, is a special issue on South Asian America (Prashad and Mathew). On the margins of the mainstream , first-generation South Asian NorthAmericans (e.g., Bharati Mukherjee, Anita Desai, Chitra Banerjee Divakuruni, and Shashi Tharoor) are read fairly widely. Second-generation authors, who have only now come of age, have begun to make the transition into this league (think of Zia Jaffery, Kiran Desai). In the historiography , Ronald Takaki's magisterial history ofAsian Americans offered considerable space to South Asians, but it was the work of Sucheta Mazumdar (on racism, Punjabi migrants, and gender), of Karen Leonard (on Punjabis in California), and of Joan Jensen (on Indians, radicalism, and the law) that provided the epistemological furrows now being hoed by a generation of post-graduate students. 186 Diaspora 8:2 1999 Until recently, much of the work on South Asians has followed the paradigm of Asian American Studies without too much selfconsciousness about the fact. There are several explanations for the inclusion of South Asians within Asian American Studies. One is the weight of popular geography; in the early twentieth century, migrants from the South Asian subcontinent experienced the same kind of brutal racism on the West Coast of North America as their counterparts from Japan, the Philippines, and China. Migrants from West Asia (the Levant and Persia) found it easier to avoid the indignities of US racism, despite the inclusion of their region in the continent of "Asia." With the advent of "area studies" in the 1940s, West Asia (from Iran to Israel, from Syria to Yemen) was detached from Asia and fell into the pool of the Middle East (or the falsely named "Islamic Crescent"). Immigrants from Asian Russia (even the now independent republics of Central Asia) did not qualify to sit within the boundaries of "Asian America" (Arum; Bennett). Second, there is the work of the state. While the US government allowed only a trickle of migrants from Asia into the US for most of this century, the Asians welcomed into the US in the mid-1960s came from very specific class backgrounds. The state, through the Immigration and Naturalization Service, took scrupulous care in selectingprofessional -technical Asians rather than those from the working classes. In the context of the urban rebellions of the 1960s, both white supremacists and liberals took refuge in the "good colored," such as the Asians, in opposition to the African Americans and the Chícanos and, indeed, from the 1980s onwards, in opposition to Arabs and African migrants. The history of anti-Asian sentiment was revised as the media discovered the post-1965 East and South Asian migrants as the "model minority." Between 1965 and 1977, 83% of South Asian migrants to the US entered with advanced degrees . These migrants joined the detachment of East Asian scientists and doctors to become part of the new "model minoritarian" Asian America (even if they were conjoined only in name). The "new racism" of ethnicity and multiculturalism allowed Asians some space in US life, at the same time...

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