The Pedagogy of the Archive: South Asian America in the Classroom

Abstract

WHEN I WALKED INTO the first session of South Asian Migration to the U.S., a course I designed and taught as a graduate student at the University of Texas, I was stunned to see the most diverse group of students I had seen in any classroom, anywhere, ever. In addition to the several “heritage” students—those of South Asian descent—I had an equal number of East Asian American students, a handful of students of European descent, and African American and Arab American students. It was not what I expected. As it turns out, the course was not what the students expected either. Few of them understood the meaning of “South Asia,” and they thought it would be a class on East Asians in America. I was not surprised to find this gap in the students’ geographic knowledge. It seems that the nomenclature that links Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka together as South Asia holds meaning primarily for scholars. Increasingly, even Pakistan sometimes migrates out in popular discourse to a newly conceived region called Af/Pak, or sometimes even into the Middle East. After I redefined the geography for them, I thought many of them would leave, but I was wrong. In fact, the tremendous diversity that characterized our classroom added depth of experience to our study as students brought their own migration and acculturation experiences to bear on their analysis of the South Asian experiences. We began by examining South Asia’s geography; I encouraged my students first to consider whether regional groupings were valuable as categories of analysis, and to consider the value of speaking of South Asians in the United States if the meaning of South Asia was not stable even in the subcontinent. As we sought to build a shared understanding of what draws the region and its peoples together, it became clear how challenging a task we faced. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh can be linked through a shared history of colonization, but they can divided by religion and language, for as Bangladesh proved in 1971, shared faith was not enough to hold together the culturally and linguistically disparate provinces of East and West Pakistan. If this shared history of colonization created affinity, it is not as clearly shared