Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture by Vanita Reddy (review)

In this book, author Vanita Reddy goes outside of the frequently analyzed realms of layered South Asian identities to provide richer insight into how ideals of beauty, femininity, and race intersect with transnationalism, particularly in North America. Given the current political tensions around American cultural identity and who can be a part of it, this book is timely in the way it examines how the politics of everyday identity are shaped by the crossing of borders and migration matters.

For readers like myself, who have focused on South Asian feminine identities within South Asia, and to others outside of the American cultural context, this book can offer a varied understanding of how South Asian femininities are fashioned on a micro-transatlantic level. The beauty lens in which Reddy explores feminine identities is crucial. Beauty in her book refers to "a mode of aesthetic judgement and a diasporic mode of embodiment—a physical attribute either earned by or conferred on the diasporic subject (in which Indian bodies are seen as possessing beauty or in which the physical attribute of beauty is defined as Indian), sometimes with the goal of producing aesthetic pleasure; and a style or performance of racialised femininity" (6). Through everyday beauty cultures of fairness, beauty contests, fashion, and the material realities of race, migration, and political economy, Reddy reveals the ways in which South Asian diaspora identities are constellations made up of complicated, multifaceted, and unstable formations. Her aim is to show how the "practices associated with beauty are socializing in the way that they make possible new racialized subject formations, affiliations, and forms of diasporic belonging" (17).

Reddy's theoretical approach, transnational feminist analysis, is a method that typically takes as its objects of study the act of migration and the crossing of borders as distinctly gendered processes (5). This transnational feminist approach is intertwined with assemblage theory, theories of neoliberal governance, migration, belonging, cultural appropriation discourse, and literary critique, to mention a few. In looking at the various layers and media (fiction, performance, websites, toys, cloth, music, experimental media), Reddy extends the analysis of South Asian identities outside of the populist realm of India and beyond mainstream South Asian media such as Bollywood.

The first half of the book, through analysis of literary texts (Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine—chapter 1; Jumpa Lahiri novels—chapter 2; Pallavi Dixit's Paegent; Neela Sen's Victory Song—chapter 3), examines how beauty operates as a neoliberal form of aesthetic and sexual capital—the possession of beauty as a way to gain access to privilege or prestige in the new global economy. The second half looks at diasporic belonging, particularly through fashion and dress cultures. Even though the author notes that her analysis departs from how fashion studies scholars often theorize fashion (because of the focus on creative input and economic processes), in many ways, I would say her analysis is not dissimilar to feminist fashion theory and the way that it has put pressure on social scientific approaches to unpack gender, race, and sexuality through film, blogs, and performance. To further reinforce the connecting of ethnicities with similar histories across time and space (which is done particularly well in chapter 5 on the Sari, where links are made to Kenya, India, and the United States), and given the absence of South Asian bodies in the dominant fashion system, it would have been good to see some comparisons or a discussion on how the violent analysis of the bindi (Chapter 4, "Oppositional Economies of Fashion in Experimental Feminist Media"); the sari (Chapter 5, "Histories of the Cloth and Sartorial Sentiment in Shailja Patels's Migritude"), and the turban (Epilogue, "Fashioning Diasporic Futures") could connect to existing fashion studies on the sari, turban, whiteness, and modest fashion.

The book reads clearly and each chapter is well-structured. It would be of value to all those studying transnational flows of Indian beauty, fashion, and multimedia...