Names and Global Habitations: The South Asian Diaspora and the problem of the proper name

Abstract

This paper focuses on a peculiarity of the Indian diaspora-its inability to name itself by national origin, diasporic history, or race-rather, it is assigned names in the diasporic location: ’East Indian’, ’South Asian’, ’Asian American’, ’Indian American’, ’Black’ (although according to Spivak, not ’Black Blacks’, or ’real Blacks’), or even ’Hindou’, regardless of religious affiliation. By ’name’, then, I am designating the equivalence of a diasporic group with its own particularized history and identity. The difficulty in self-identifying as ’Indian’ signifies a relative ’belatedness’, a pre-emption of ’Indian’ and South Asian history by other histories. This paper seeks to examine the importance of that misappropriation and proposes that the consequences are matters of both signification and of ethics. The Indian diaspora constructs both meaning and narrative for itself by analogy to a supposedly more meaningful narrative-indenture to slavery, for example-in which it is positioned as a narrative of mimicry. Besides histories, names embed both moral imperatives and ethical claims. The misappropriation of a proper name creates uncertainty about what proper rights the ’Indian’ or ’South Asian’ can claim in the global context, especially relative to the so-called ’primary’ marginalized groups. Living by analogy, by mimicry, makes claims to compensation or affirmative action on the grounds of historical marginalization not only suspect but suspiciously opportunistic and unethical.