Afro-Asian Intimacies and the Politics and Aesthetics of Cross-Racial Struggle in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala

Abstract

In this article, I deploy the analytic of intimacy in order to critically reexamine South Asian American filmmaker Mira Nair’s groundbreaking film Mississippi Masala (1991). I define intimacy as the colonial management of sex, on the one hand, and as the inaccessible and unseen excesses of such forms of management, such as alliances, affections, and feelings of close familiarity among differently racialized subjects, on the other. I show that the structure and form of Nair’s film give expression to a set of intimacies between men that point to the political limits of heteronormative kinship—defined through state and culturally sanctioned practices of Asian endogamy and bourgeois domesticity—as the basis of Afro-Asian political alliance.