Ishtyle : Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife by Kareem Khubchandani

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ishtyle : Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife by Kareem Khubchandani Sony Coráñez Bolton (bio) Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife by Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Xxiv + 262 pp. $34.95 paper. ISBN: 978-0-472-07421-1. Kareem Khubchandani's Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Night Life is a performance studies ethnography centering the subcultural lives of queer South Asian (mostly) men in Bangalore and Chicago. Using an innovative form of participant observation that speaks to Khubchandani's positioning in these communities as a drag artist (whose nom de guerre is LaWhore Vagistan), he elicits spectacularly rich ethnographic descriptions that read against the presumed heteronormativity of "Bollywood tropes, narratives, and choreographies" (xiv) while also embracing the queer meanings that are inherent to them as they [End Page 507] play out Indian nightlife—indeed, "drag [is the] research method" (xiv). His is a refreshing study written with verve and rigor that should be widely read and embraced in Asian American and queer of color studies. Khubchandani defines "ishtyle" as a "form of vernacular performance" or "accented style" emerging in response to the social normalizations of multinational capitalism. Ishtyle "enables alternative affective, erotic, and social transactions by accenting the night with vernacular articulations of Indianness" (2). Such "accents" are so conceptually powerful because they "not only wield the performative force of history they have acquired in repetition to conjure gender, race, and class, but [also] their kinetic force physically 'punctures' space and time to bring bodies into new proximity and relation" (9). In other words, ishtyle is a repertoire of stylized acts, speech, and sartorial flair that forges queer community through its ontological difference from mainstream cultural formations shaped by Orientalism and white supremacy. At base, this is a book about subjectivity and agency—subjecthood that you cannot miss (and wouldn't want to) for how flamboyant, queer, jocular, witty, and irreverent it is. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the politics of accented styles under respectability regimes in Bangalore. Chapter 1 analyzes the contradictory cultural impulses of Hindutva normativity that draw on British colonial antecedents and the anxieties around westernization under economic modernization. Chapter 2 takes up the unenviable though brilliantly ironic task of analyzing the politics of social dance under legal mandates in Bangalore outlawing it between 2006 and 2014. Chapter 3 speaks to the complicated politics of interracial desire centered on the Boystown "gayborhood" in Chicago. A centerpiece chapter of the study in general, it substantiates the overall claim that Indianness and its queer brownness are a performative node around which we can come to a more nuanced understanding of race, sexuality, nation, and desire not limited to South Asian diasporic subjects. I was struck by the attention given to the fungibility of brownness that causes misrecognitions between Latinx and Indian bodies—an interchangeability that was a welcome and profound contribution that exceeds the seemingly narrow parameters of "gay Indian nightlife." I found this so valuable because it provided a deep and powerful justification to foreground interracial encounter rather than perpetually affixing queer subject-making to a central signifying whiteness. Through vim, humor, and candor emblematic of an intellectually rigorous "ishtylized" ethnography, Khubchandani implores us to prioritize "axes of desire" that "center queer interracial intimacies" that displace the "sexual racism and unrequited desire from white men" (100). Sign me up. Chapter 4 speaks to the author's own grassroots efforts to build queer Desi community in Chicago through the serialized party Jai Ho! Here the analytical framing of ishtyle is extended to theorize its "capacity … to unsettle whiteness [End Page 508] and its accompanying Orientalism in gay nightlife" (111). While I do not doubt ishtyle's ability to potentiate such a critique, I was curious about a tendency to overly romanticize queer migrant cultures, particularly vis-à-vis settler colonialism. The author reflects on the "ability to emplace migrant subjects, not as settlers with possessive attachment to land but as performers who have permission to feel at home every once in a while" (111, emphasis mine). This opens up a productive conversation on the ways that queer migrant culture generally in settler colonial countries might present implicit and deeply structural contraventions to indigenous sovereignty. I wish...