State, Culture, and Religion: Political Action and Representation among South Asians in North America

Abstract

Diaspora 9:1 2000 ~,~ 'State~'.1 Culture, and Religion: ... e(Jf.· itiofl Action and Representation 'F amJ!Jftg South Asians in North America •iii:~ ~ti~-- ~~ j;~- Karen Leonard 1 University of California, Irvine In what ways, other than through aesthetics, is the politics of diaspora constituted? Pnina Werbner has suggested that, in the formation of diasporas, real politics might consist of transna- tional moral gestures of philanthropy and political lobbying ... grounded in ideas about a shared past and future. 2 Thus she urges us to interrogate the relationship between politics and art, or real politics and aesthetics, in diasporas and/or transnational communi- ties (concepts not the same, but increasingly conflated in the literature: Vertovec 277). This challenging question comes out of Werbner's work with South Asian Muslims in the British context, where one can talk of the moral community of Muslims as a diasporic one. There are Mus- lims in the UK from the Middle East, Cyprus, Malaysia, and else- where, but most are Pakistani and Indian immigrants with a shared past. In North America, however, many other Muslims preceded the South Asians, and in the US, African Americans constitute some 40% of the American Muslim community. Esti- mates of the Muslim population in the US range widely, but in 1992 the American Muslim· Council put it between 5 and 8 million, with indigenous Muslims at 42%, South Asians at 24.4%, and Arabs at 12.4% (Nu'man 13). Canadian Muslims are fewer in number, some 350,000; while many are Canadian-born, these are mostly second-generation rather than converts (Khan 29-30). In the US, not only are indigenous Muslims the single largest group, but immigrant Muslims represent many diasporas, not just one. However, it is the differences between Britain and America, and between Canada and the US, that make the relationship of art and politics an interesting question. Taking Indians and Pakistanis in North America to be a single diasporic community, I will nonethe- less draw religious and generational distinctions among them, con- sidering Muslims and, very briefly, Sikhs and Hindus. These dis- t inctions are then related to an issue much debated in Asian l ... merican studies and identity politics, the tension between the diasporic perspective and claiming America (Wong), to argue that Asian American and Muslim American politics both lead to a rlic:c:nlvinP r~t.hPr t.h~n ~ nPrj)Pt.irntion . of thP rlii:umoric nature of