Beyond Bollywood: Exhibiting South Asian America

This essay examines Beyond Bollywood, a landmark exhibition about South Asian Americans at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Focusing on the curatorial premise of the exhibition, the aesthetic objects it incorporates, and viewers’ affective relations to these objects, I argue that Beyond Bollywood generates a rich repertoire of feelings that reframe the relationship between visuality and representation in Asian American exhibition cultures. From exuberance and pride at the upwardly mobile immigrant narrative mapped by archival objects, to shame and anxiety generated through photographic artworks, Beyond Bollywood provokes us to consider the limits of visibility as a form of representational politics.