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27 CRAFTING SOLIDARITIES Vijay Prashad Azia, Red Star Youth Project, Leicester, 1980s: “We come from all kinds of families, but when it comes to our rights we are black.” —PNINA WERBNER AND MUHAMMAD ANWAR, BLACK AND ETHNIC LEADERSHIPS IN BRITAIN Asian Indian, New York City, 1970s: “I can’t call myself white. But Caucasian, that’s the blood, I think, as far as racial things go. . . . On forms, I put myself down as brown, I can’t help it—I can’t write myself down as white and I can’t write myself as black.” —MAXINE FISHER, THE INDIANS OF NEW YORK CITY Many people adhere to the idea that political interests must be based on a single conception of identity (whether of gender, race, class, or sexual orientation). This theory, which operates under the omnibus label “identity politics,” wallows in parochialism and rejects any attempt to formulate universal categories (considered to be “totalitarian”). This tradition fails to acknowledge the dialectical relationship between parochialism and universality. I argue that the process of politics encourages the formation of parochial identities (which retain the tension of our contemporary inequalities) alongside those categories that offer the possibility of finding common ground that would allow us to abolish parochialism in favor of a complex universalism of the future. Such universal categories (of which “people of color” is one) might enable us to craft complex solidarities to struggle against the divisions among various communities. The question of the position of South Asians within Asian America is not an abstract question posed for a Platonic solution. The question, in my opinion, is posed to allow us to tease out the contradictions within the question itself in order to bridge the “gap” through praxis. In order to open the contradictions of the question of the “gap,” I want to explore the terms that are presumed to be sundered apart (“Asian America” and “South Asian America”) and to see if these terms indeed belong to the same order of reality and can therefore be joined. This essay is then a meditation on categories as well as an argument for a particular category as the bridge between communities. In 1960, W.E.B. Du Bois heralded an acknowledgment of commonality between South Asians and blacks, which although premature in 1960, is important to repeat (and it is quoted below): the history of colonial oppression and the contemporary reality of capitalist exploitation links South Asians with other people of color and forces us to confront the question of linkages. The site of linkage, I argue, is already being mapped out by an urban youth culture that is notoriously radical and angry: in a revision of a Punjabi wedding song, Paaras sings the praises of “My Black Prince, My Black Sardar: Remove the Whites” (Kala Shah Kala, Kala Shah Kala, mere kale hi Sardar, Gore aure dafa karo). The lyrics’ cultural roots provoke us to think about the antiracism of this youth statement as well as the ethnocentrism and masculinity of the Bhangra culture that it refers to (I will say more about the culture of Bhangra later, but for now it is enough to know it as the name that defines a cultural tradition originating in England among South Asians and heavily inflected by Punjabi and Caribbean traditions). The youth bear the hopes of the future, but they also carry with them avoidable components of our cultural history. This essay is an attempt to chart the structural location of South Asians in America as well as to argue that South Asians must craft a political category that is open to the formation of broad solidarities. In order to arrive at that point, I must first elaborate upon the central concept that governs the use of “South Asian American”—Asian American. “ASIAN AMERICAN” “Asian American” is a category with a series of meanings, each forged out of different political and historical contexts and projects. In his study of the Asian American Movement, William Wei offers us two dominant meanings: Asian American as a cultural identity, and Asian American as a sociopolitical movement .1 In a remarkable oversight, Wei does not question the term “Asian American,” which he uses in both senses simultaneously. In an important corrective to Wei’s history of the movement and to his use of the term “Asian American,” Glenn Omatsu historicizes the meaning of the term. Omatsu argues that the Asian American movement began as a sociopolitical movement that “embraced fundamental questions of oppression and...

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