The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America (review)

Chair: Daniel Y. Kim Committee Members: Kandice Chuh, Sunaina Maira Winner: The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America by Rajini Srikanth While the committee was impressed by the sheer number of excellent works published in this field during 2004, our unanimous choice for the book award in cultural studies was Rajini Srikanth's The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. A groundbreaking study of the literature of South Asian America, The World Next Door makes a powerful argument for the political and ethical value of humane reading practices in a political climate that discourages any but the most impoverished understandings of the relationship of the United States to the rest of the world. Rather than reiterating well-worn debates within Asian American Studies, this book simply goes about the business of showing how South Asian American literary works "supply the narratives and images that are compelling enough to make readers in the United States aware of the gaps in their consciousness, and intriguing enough to move them to fill these gaps by reading with care and living with vision." Where these texts attempt to move readers, as Srikanth elegantly demonstrates throughout, is toward a desire to understand the socio-historical contexts that shape their complexities—contexts that range across the diaspora and to South Asia, and that are shaped by forces both national and global. The "wider landscape of other nations and other peoples" [End Page 203] that these texts make visible and the "enlargement of perspective" they help to engender are of particularly urgent moral value, as Srikanth makes plain, in a period marked by heightened militarism abroad and the erosion of civil liberties at home. While The World Next Door keeps its readers ever mindful of political contexts in which each of the literary texts she examines is embedded, the readings themselves are graceful, lucid, eminently accessible and, indeed, often quite moving. The aesthetic and emotional power of each literary work is effectively conveyed as is its ethical complexity. In treating each text and author with such care, Srikanth communicates the pleasure that the act of reading literature affords while always making clear that such pleasure is never innocent of politics. But, The World Next Door is commendable not only for how it reads but also for what it reads. For this is a pioneering study of South Asian American literature that is the first to bring together the work of such authors as: Meena Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali, Amitav Ghosh, Ginu Kamani, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Tahira Naqvi, Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, Abraham Verghese. Rather than demonstrating how each writer's work relates back to a single paradigm, Srikanth emphasizes the multiplicity of political concerns treated by this tradition: the variety of intensely felt forms of political affiliation apparent in writers across the diaspora; how South Asian American representations of desire, gender and sexuality require an interpretive framework that does not assume the modern West as a norm or as its central site of struggle; the ethics of representation as they relate to South Asian American authors who write about "what they are not"; the contradictions and tensions that define South Asian American literary attempts to criticize and rework ideologies of American exceptionalism. We are confident that this work will quickly become indispensable to the study and teaching of South Asian American literature and culture. The World Next Door is an eminently interdisciplinary project and its well-crafted literary analyses always emerge through a careful consideration of historical context. But what is indeed quite distinctive about this work are the specific claims it makes about the place of literary analysis within an interdisciplinary Asian American Studies—about, in particular, the ethics of interpretation. As Srikanth asserts, reading this literature must be "a just act—doing justice to the contexts from which the writing emerges and challenging one's imagination to encounter the texts with courage, humility, and daring."

Rethinking the Center from the Margins K. Scott Wong (bio) Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. By Gary Y. Okihiro. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. 203 pages. $25.00 (cloth). $12.95 (paper). Since the 1968–1969 Third World Strike at Francisco State College and University of California-Berkeley, when Asian American studies emerged as part of the political/educational agenda of Ethnic studies, the field has attained a fair degree of respectability and maturity. 1 A number of universities and colleges now offer courses in Asian American studies, a variety of English department courses often include Asian American literature, and most recently, the University of California, Santa Barbara has established the nation’s first Asian American studies department. In addition, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) has grown into a nationally recognized academic association with an annual meeting, and the AAAS regularly sponsors a panel at the yearly American Studies Association conference. The maturity of the field, in terms of published scholarly work, was exemplified with the publication of Ronald Takaki’s Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1989) and Sucheng Chan’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1991). These two survey texts of Asian American history marked the point at which enough research had already been published to warrant and sustain the writing of two synthetic, yet interpretive, studies of the histories of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and South and Southeast Asian Americans. Utilizing primary and secondary sources, these two scholars summed up a whole generation of Asian American historical studies and thus provided the field with standards by which future synthetic historical work in the field will be measured. With [End Page 415] the publication of Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture, Asian American studies has been advanced again by Gary Okihiro’s adept blending of history, literature, sociology, and cultural studies, all of which come together to provide a provocative and insightful reading of the Asian American experience and how it fits into the larger themes of American history, Ethnic studies, American studies, and contemporary debates on what it means to be an “American.” This book is made up of six chapters, each originally presented as lectures (printed here with slight modification) at Amherst College in the spring of 1992 during Okihiro’s tenure there as the John J. McCloy ‘16 Professor of American Institutions and International Relations (Okihiro is an associate professor of history and director of the Asian American studies program at Cornell University). As he mentions in the preface, these lectures were written and presented during a time of cultural debates. During this period, there was a “fervent and oftentimes heated debate about the idea of a mainstream, about the core of American history and culture, about intellectual ‘ghettoization’ and ethnic ‘balkanization’“ (ix). Thus with debates of this nature in the background, these lectures take up the issues of where and when Asian Americans enter and become part of the larger American cultural and historical landscape. There is also a bittersweet irony that these lectures were commissioned by the John J. McCloy Distinguished Visiting Professorship. During the Second World War, McCloy served as the Assistant Secretary of War (and later as the High Commissioner to Germany and the president of the World Bank) and was a staunch supporter of the wartime internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans. Okihiro, one of the foremost historians of Japanese America, must have relished the opportunity to deliver these lectures under the auspices of McCloy’s legacy. 2 A general theme that reappears throughout these lectures is the contention that the core values and ideals of the nation emanate not from the mainstream but from the margins—from among Asian and African Americans, Latinos and American Indians, women, and gays and lesbians. In their struggles for equality, these groups have helped preserve and advance the principles and ideals of democracy and have thereby made America a freer place for all. (ix) Viewing American history in this way requires a recentering of our perspectives. Herein lies the book’s main contribution to the currrent discourse about race and ethnicity, gender studies, American studies, and [End Page...

Much of the public discourse as well as research regarding the negative impact of COVID-19-related anti-Asian discrimination has been conducted at the broad racial group level, yet data aggregation masks critical points of diversity among Asian Americans. We conducted an online survey of 620 Asian American adults in December 2020 and examined whether there were any demographic differences-including by ethnic subgroup and Chinese street race (being Chinese or being mistaken as Chinese)-in their experiences of COVID-19-related stress, direct and vicarious discrimination, and psychological outcomes. Our analyses found that younger age was correlated with higher reports of pandemic stress, discrimination, distress, and worry. Female and U.S.-born participants reported higher levels of pandemic stress and vicarious discrimination, but there were no gender or nativity differences in levels of direct discrimination. Being uninsured was also related to higher levels of pandemic stress, discrimination, and distress. East Asian Americans reported significantly lower frequencies of direct anti-Asian discrimination than did South Asian or Southeast Asian Americans, but the ethnic subgroups did not differ in their reports of vicarious discrimination. Of note, Chinese street race was not associated with either direct or vicarious discrimination. Separate hierarchical regression analyses for East Asian, South Asian, and Southeast Asian participants revealed that, regardless of ethnicity, racial discrimination significantly contributed to psychological distress and worry beyond the effects of pandemic stress. However, the three groups varied in the demographic indicators and COVID-19 stressors that were associated with psychological outcomes. Pandemic stress was more strongly associated with negative outcomes among South Asian Americans than East Asian and Southeast Asian Americans, and neither direct nor vicarious discrimination were associated with mental health among South Asian Americans. Direct discrimination, compared to vicarious discrimination, was a particularly robust predictor of both distress and worry among East Asian Americans. For Southeast Asian Americans, direct discrimination significantly predicted higher levels of distress, whereas vicarious discrimination predicted higher levels of worry. Vicarious discrimination was not significantly related to distress across ethnic subgroups. Results suggest that practitioners and policy makers would benefit from attending to these within-group differences in Asian Americans' experiences during the pandemic.

Meeting Asian/Arab American StudiesThinking Race, Empire, and Zionism in the U.S. Sunaina Maira (bio) and Magid Shihade (bio) I am the witness of the massacre I am the victim of the map I am the son of simple words . . . —Mahmoud Darwish, from "Poem of the Land"1 Speak, your lips still have their liberty Speak, still yours is the spoken word . . . Speak, for the truth is alive even now Speak, say all you wish you had said. —Faiz Ahmed Faiz, from "Speak" (1941)2 Why link Asian and Arab American Studies? Why should we speak of Arab American studies in Asian American studies, or have a conversation in ethnic studies about points of convergence and divergence between these two areas? Is it in order to recognize an emerging ethnic studies field in the U.S., with all the limitations that a politics of recognition based on multiculturalism entails? Is it to extend a comparative ethnic studies approach that is increasingly transforming Asian American studies while raising questions about the definition of ethnic and racial boundaries? In our view, the answer is all of these, but much more. We argue here that speaking of Arab and Asian [End Page 117] American studies in the same breath is ultimately valuable because it illuminates a broader and more urgent issue: the need to develop a fuller analysis of U.S. empire. The meeting of Asian American and Arab American studies has been increasingly highlighted in discussions after 9/11 as it has become apparent that Asian American—particularly South Asian—and Arab American communities as well as Muslim Americans more generally, have similar experiences as targets in the "war on terrorism" waged by the United States. The question of how to produce intellectual and political knowledge to respond to the everyday crisis of empire is urgent at this particular moment, but we want to point out that it has always been so—the conjuncture between Asian/Arab American studies helps to situate U.S. empire in a much longer historical trajectory that links movements in, and out of, Asia and the Middle East. Imperial power operates by obscuring the links between homeland projects of racial subordination and minority co-optation and overseas strategies of economic restructuring and political domination. This link between the domestic and global fronts of empire can be exposed only if we expand our frame of analysis to consider the ways in which categories of subjects such as "Asian American" and "Arab American" are positioned in relation to U.S. empire. Ethnic studies has focused in large part on documenting, understanding, and challenging the construction of ethnic and racial boundaries as they intersect with other axes of domination, such as gender, sexuality, and class, within the nation. However, there has also been a movement in Asian American studies to acknowledge the transnational dimensions of Asian communities and histories, on the one hand, and the paradoxes and pitfalls of a multiculturalist identity politics, on the other. So the meeting of Arab/Asian American studies highlights the question of borders, and the political and epistemological work of boundaries in shaping our understanding of power and resistance. It helps us to locate the issue of ethnic and racial borders within the larger frame of U.S. empire, and to understand that the question facing Asian American studies today is how to intellectually and institutionally confront imperial, not just national or ethnic, politics. This has always been the challenge for ethnic studies, which has often remained confined within a national frame. [End Page 118] The purpose of linking Asian and Arab American studies is not to colonize Arab American studies within an ever-expanding rubric of pan-Asian ethnicity, but to do the opposite: to challenge the ever-expanding borders of an imperial project that operates through direct as well as proxy wars, neo-colonial occupation, and client states. Ultimately, it is for Arab Americanists themselves to decide where they want to be situated in the academy and how Arab American studies should be introduced into the curriculum. Research on Arab Americans is growing and gaining more academic recognition through new faculty hires and programs, though it continues to occur in...

Model Minority Terrorist:Post-9/11 Asian American Racial Formation and Brown Peril Narrative Discourse in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist Stephen Hong Sohn1 (bio) Over approximately a single decade (1965–1975), the landscape for Asian Americans changed radically: the harshest quotas for Asian immigrants were lifted, ethnic studies programs were created, and academic excellence became associated with Asian Americans. Given all these seemingly positive changes, how can we engage the continued production of novels that fixate upon damaged Asian American subjects? How does racism get configured in today's age of unparalleled legislative inclusion? If the model minority stereotype merely represents the flip side to the yellow peril (Okihiro 142), then Asian American racial formation continues to revolve around a subtle dialectic in which oppression and prejudice emerge in more insidious ways. We can thus read the work of contemporary Asian American fictions through their illumination of the malleable contours of racial formation, as it has changed during the post-1965 period. Since 1966, the predominant racial formation attached to Asian Americans has been that of the model minority. Presumed to be astute, hardworking, and obedient, Asian Americans have been promoted as the minority ideal. However, South Asian Anglophone and South Asian American fiction writers have been incisive in their attention to racial formation, as it was re-scripted in the post-9/11 moment and as civil liberties [End Page 232] began to erode in light of the war on terror. In a range of novels, the South Asian American body transforms into a site of racial anxiety that manifests in acts of prejudice and violence. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist takes a prominent place within this grouping, which includes Marina Budhos's Ask Me No Questions, Saher Alam's The Groom to Have Been, H. M. Naqvi's Home Boy, Nafisa Haji's The Writing on My Forehead, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Queen of Dreams. But Hamid's status as a transnational author has moved critical considerations of his work largely into the purview of postcolonial and global studies. Though published in 2007, the novel has already received widespread critical attention in dozens of articles, book chapters, reviews, and conference papers. Some scholars read the novel as exemplary of a global or world novel (Medovoi; Morey, "'The Rules of the Game Have Changed'") or as a postcolonial narrative boasting a trenchant critique of American imperialism and globalization (Singh; Haider; Keeble). Others focus on its unique combination of formal elements and social contexts (Adami; Mandala White). My article builds upon the work of Anna Hartnell, who argues that the novel reveals the complicated dynamics of religion and racial formation. As Hartnell notes, "The fact that America hosts a far more assimilated and upwardly mobile population of Muslims and Arabs than any European country suggests" (340) a form of privilege that some minority groups could not claim, at least prior to 9/11. Hartnell's larger point is that the novel critiques the melting pot formulation precisely because America's racial and religious minorities rarely inhabit the same positions in social hierarchies and are often positioned against one another. I extend Hartnell's argument by emphasizing the shift in American ethnoracial and religious alignments that repositions South Asians alongside Arabs and Muslims in the period following 9/11. The novel's depiction of a Pakistani transnational necessarily places this text within the purview of Asian American Studies, its attendant critical methodologies, and its central thematics (such as racial formation). At the same time, this novel encourages further interdisciplinary dialogues. With respect to US ethnic studies after 9/11, Ibrahim G. Aoudé provocatively considers how "Ethnic Studies, especially Asian American Studies, is compelled to deal with Arab American issues if it wants to remain a relevant field and revitalize its traditional commitments" (144). [End Page 233] Nadine C. Naber notes the affiliations between Asian American and "Arab/South Asian/Muslim American(s)" in that same period through the germination of activist coalitions (217–27). In light of the heightened paranoia, Shireen Roshanravan investigates how the targeting of Filipino airport screeners after the terrorist attacks demonstrated a large-scale attack on civil liberties in the name of...

If the rubric of the Global Anglophone has come to be largely synonymous with the postcolonial, a development that some commentators have viewed with concern and even alarm, this essay explores a certain politically aspirational potential in the catachrestic elisions this category might engender. For if postcolonial studies has always struggled with a certain exclusionism predicated on how the South Asian context has functioned as its paradigmatic example, then the category of the Global Anglophone might help the field shed its own version of provincialism and develop more expansive geographic and temporal understandings of empire. Drawing in part from the work of Roanne L. Kantor, which bridges South Asian and Latin American studies, this essay explores how this newly ascendant category might help bring the fields of postcolonial, Asian American, and East Asian studies into more explicit alliance. While first acknowledging the potential identitarian tensions that might emerge between Asian scholars hired under the rubric of the Global Anglophone and Asian American and/or Ethnic Studies respectively, this essay ultimately argues for a more coalitional awareness of how seemingly distinct strains and traditions of anticolonial and antiracist scholarship might be relationally articulated to one another.

Insurgency and Asian American Studies in the Time of Black Lives Matter Justin Leroy (bio) Peter Liang has the distinction of being one of approximately a dozen police officers convicted of murder or manslaughter for killing a civilian while on duty since 2005. Liang's victim was Akai Gurley, a black man shot dead after Liang fired his weapon into an empty stairwell of the East New York public housing complex where Gurley lived. A New York Supreme Court justice eventually reduced Liang's charge to criminally negligent homicide and declined to sentence him to serve time in prison. However, the initial charge of second-degree manslaughter could have sent Liang away for fifteen years. Liang was the only NYPD officer convicted in an on-duty shooting in well over a decade; the question of whether he was a racial scapegoat soon emerged. Asian American activists in New York City and beyond mobilized in defense of Liang, in what New York Times staff writer Jay Caspian Kang called "the most pivotal moment in the Asian-American community since the Rodney King riots" more than two decades earlier.1 In response, many young, progressive Asian Americans engaged their families and communities about issues of police brutality and the importance of Black Lives Matter. The authors of a widely translated "Letter for Black Lives" explained that the constant threat of violence black Americans face is not the same as other forms of discrimination, and made the case that the (always incomplete) civil rights protections Asian Americans do enjoy is in large part due to black-led freedom struggles.2 The letter was a tremendous show of solidarity, and served as a template for other groups, such as Latinos and second-generation Africans, to discuss antiblackness with their families as well. Still, the letter is fraught with old tropes. It draws too sharp a distinction between black and Asian racialization, as when the authors write, "It's true [End Page 279] we face discrimination … but for the most part, nobody thinks 'dangerous criminal' when we are walking down the street." Many South Asian, Muslim, and Arab Americans are in fact considered "dangerous" while walking down the street, boarding a plane, or speaking Arabic or Urdu in public. The letter concludes by referencing the American Dream: "The American Dream that we seek is a place where all Americans can live without fear of police violence." It ultimately offers a vision of justice that reinforces discrete forms of racialization, always looking inward toward the nation. But the power of Asian American studies in this moment is not in reconciling narratives of antiblack racism with Asian migration to the United States for the purpose of pressing the nation to uphold its foundational values of colorblind liberty and justice for all. Rather, considering Black Lives Matter through the lens of Asian American studies should shift our gaze to the never-ending wars in the Pacific and Middle East, to the insurgent and insurrectionary moments of resistance to U.S. empire. Asian American studies should force us to reject any notion that continued violence against black Americans is aberrant in an otherwise steady march toward justice. Asian American studies allows us to frame antiblackness as part of a conjoined history of domestic and imperial forms of racial governance. An ever-timely reminder that despite being central to U.S. race relations, antiblack violence always has global stakes. Take, for example, former Attorney General Eric Holder's stance that the U.S. government's targeted drone assassination program could be likened to the police officer's permissible use of lethal force in pursuit of a fleeing felon.3 The gulf between foreign war and domestic policing is bridged by the racialized procedures of state-administered death. Moon-Ho Jung has argued that despite the field's coalescence around histories of migration and exclusion, Asian American history is still wedded to national frameworks and imaginaries. Jung suggests that instead of advocating simply for national inclusion, Asian American history "has the radical potential to dislodge nationalist narratives and, at base, to expose and critique the racial and imperial formations that have made the conception of the United States possible in the...

Reviewed by: Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans by Sangay K. Mishra Nalini Iyer DESIS DIVIDED: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans. By Sangay K. Mishra. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2016. Sangay Mishra's book breaks new ground in South Asian American studies because he moves beyond the work of earlier scholars such as Vijay Mishra, Kamala Visweswaran, Monisha Das Gupta who had critiqued the model minority discourse used to frame the experiences of South Asian Americans. Mishra builds on this earlier work but provides a systematic analysis of the divergences and schisms within the ethnic group to study how this immigrant community has mobilized politically in recent years and in particular post 9/11. Based on interviews with South Asians in New York city and Los Angeles as well as analysis of national data from the 2000–2001 Pilot Study of the National Asian American Political Survey and the 2008 National Asian American Survey, Mishra looks at the patterns of political participation amongst South Asians both within the US and transnationally. The book begins with a socio-political history of South Asians in the U.S. which is familiar territory for those working in the field but necessary to introduce the book's overall project. He continues with an analysis of theories of ethno-racial mobilization and their relevance to the study of South Asian Americans. He then proceeds to explore post 9/11 racial targeting of South Asians and how that shapes political mobilization. The book continues with an examination of dominant modes of political mobilization amongst South Asians and concludes with two chapters that examine the community's transnational political engagement and how diasporic nationalism influences the members' engagement with U.S. politics. This study is timely and conceptualized well. As an economically powerful and rapidly growing community, South Asian Americans are increasingly active in politics at the local, regional, and national levels. However, Mishra's major intervention is that the South Asian American community is not a monolith and that national origin, religion, caste, and class are important factors that complicate how we understand the community. This approach of considering vectors of identity within the group is necessary in the evolution of South Asian American studies and has a significant methodological impact on the field. There are a couple of aspects of this study that could have been nuanced. The first is the question of gender. Although Mishra does devote about a dozen pages to social justice politics in chapter four and addresses how organizations like Sakhi and Manavi among [End Page 117] others that did ground breaking work on domestic violence prevention and advocacy and provided an avenue for political mobilization, the issues of gender, sexuality, and working class issues are lumped into this section and the analysis feels perfunctory. Is gender not a major factor if turbaned Sikh men and hijabi women were targets of racial violence post 9/11? It is not clear what percentage of respondents to the interviews were women? The discussion of South Asian racialization needs to be an intersectional one that accounts for gender and sexuality in the formation of race. The second issue is that of national origins. Mishra admits in his introduction that despite his best attempts, the study is dominated by Indian American issues. He justifies this because Indian Americans are numerically the largest amongst South Asians and also because South Asian American studies as a field has not produced enough scholarship on Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and other smaller South Asian communities. Both these reasons are real and important, but this Indo-centrism skews the argument. In particular, much of the chapter on diasporic nationalism is Indo-centric. Had Mishra engaged in a discussion of a smaller South Asian community such as the Sri Lankan American community and their diasporic nationalism, a more nuanced picture would have emerged. Sri Lankan Tamils who escaped a decades-long civil war have had an active and different form of diasporic nationalism during and after the civil war. Does the different post-independence political history of India and Sri Lanka impact diasporic nationalism differently? These critiques of the question of gender and Indo-centrism do not...

Using combined data from the population-based 2001 and 2003 California Health Interview Surveys, we examined ethnic and gender-specific smoking behaviors and the effect of three acculturation indicators on cigarette smoking behavior and quitting status among 8,192 Chinese, Filipino, South Asian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese American men and women. After adjustment for potential confounders, current smoking prevalence was higher and the quit rate was lower for Korean, Filipino, and Vietnamese American men compared with Chinese American men. Women's current smoking prevalence was lower than men's in all six Asian American subgroups. South Asian and Korean American women reported lower quit rates than women from other ethnic subgroups. Asian American men who reported using only English at home had lower current smoking prevalence and higher quit rates, except for Filipino and South Asian American men. Asian American women who reported using only English at home had higher current smoking prevalence except for Japanese women. Being a second or later generation immigrant was associated with lower smoking prevalence among all Asian American subgroups of men. Less educated men and women had higher smoking prevalence and lower quit rates. In conclusion, both current smoking prevalence and quit rates vary distinctively across gender and ethnic subgroups among Asian Americans in California. Acculturation appears to increase the risk of cigarette smoking for Asian American women. Future tobacco-control programs should target at high-risk Asian American subgroups, defined by ethnicity, acculturation status, and gender.

Reviewed by: POSITIONS, Special Issue; “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies Kamala Visweswaran POSITIONS, Special Issue; “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies.” Edited by Elaine Kim and Lisa Lowe. Durham: Duke University, 1997. The journal Positions was founded in 1993 with the objective of providing “a new forum of debate for all concerned with the social, intellectual, and political events unfolding in East Asia and within the Asian diaspora.” Its mission statement identified intensifying global flows of labor and capital in the late 20th century as central concerns, and asked its readers to reflect on how these transformations might recast priorities in scholarship, teaching, and criticism. It is therefore in keeping with the intellectual tradition already established by the journal, that a special edition on “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies” explores emerging relationships between Asian and Asian American studies. [End Page 308] Positions, over the last few years, has published groundbreaking articles on questions of colonialism and modernity in East Asia, and explored the distinct perspectives post-structuralist and postcolonial theory might bring to area studies. This issue of the journal asks what ethnic studies might bring to area studies, and conversely establishes the importance of linking ethnic studies to critical area studies, or more particularly, of linking the contradictory, but mutually constitutive relations between Asians and Asian Americans. Guest editors Elaine Kim and Lisa Lowe make it clear that such a relationship must account for “the long history of dissymmetry between the fields...the differences in their institutional locations, and the large gaps between the subjects and knowledges posited by each field” (viii). Yet they also establish the necessity of forging such a relationship. They remind us that Asian Americans are formed simultaneously within U.S. national and global frameworks. The return of (Filipino, Vietnamese, and Korean) immigrants to the imperial center means that their racialization under terms of the U.S nation-state can’t be understood without understanding histories of colonialism and capitalist development in Asia. Such an approach disrupts the master narrative of becoming a national citizen for Asian American subjects, and productively recasts the relationship of Asian American studies with American studies. This special issue of Positions is, therefore, a timely and important collection of essays that significantly contributes to, and expands upon national discussions about the shape of Asian American studies east of California, reflected in other edited collections over the last decade: Gary Okihiro’s Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies (1988), Shirley Hune’s (1990) Asian Americans; Comparative and Global Perspectives, and Robert Lee and Lihbin Shao’s (1994) Building Blocks for Asian American Studies: Proceedings of the 1992 East Of California Asian American Studies Conference. Thus, Kim and Lowe tie the emergence of theoretical “new formations” in Asian American studies to “new immigrations”— by which is meant not only the inclusion of more recent post-1965 immigrant groups such as Koreans, Indians, and Vietnamese, but the multiple, back and forth migrations of such groups resulting from U.S imperial and economic policies. They identify and enumerate four major pressures (ix) that shape the questions to be posed as part of these new formations: 1. the ‘post-Fordist’ restructuring of global capitalism that employs ‘mixed production’ and ‘flexible accumulation’ and permits the exploitations of Asian workers both in Asia and the United States; [End Page 309] 2. the changed demography of the Asian American population as a result of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which increased and diversified Filipino, Korean, Southeast Asian, and South Asian communities in the United States; 3. the colonial and neocolonial role of the United States in the Asian states from which these new Asian American communities emigrate; and 4. the failure of citizenship and civil rights to guarantee equality of opportunity and resources to poor, racialized and gendered communities in the United States. Editors Kim and Lowe have done an excellent job of laying out the parameters of this new relationship by including articles that address the politics and dynamics of the new immigration. Essays by Peter Kiang and Anuradha Advani reaffirm the field’s historic focus on community studies by examining relationships between community groups...

The concept of duty is overrated (Fire) The swamiji's testicles have grown too big for his loincloth (Fire) It's a dyke thing (Junky Punky Girlz) Eswar Allah tero Naam (Junky Punky Girlz) Before ex...

Candida auris is an emerging multiresistant yeast against which amphotericin B (AMB) is still the first therapeutic choice in certain clinical situations (i.e., meningitis, endophthalmitis, and urinary tract infections). As data about the in vitro killing activity of AMB against C. auris clades are lacking, we determined MICs, minimum fungicidal concentrations (MFCs), and killing activity of AMB against 22 isolates representing the 4 major C. auris clades (South Asian n = 6; East Asian n = 4; South African n = 6, and South American n = 6). MIC values were ≤1 mg/L regardless of clades; MFC ranges were, 1–4 mg/L, 2–4 mg/L, 2 mg/L, and 2–8 mg/L for South Asian, East Asian, South African, and South American clades, respectively. AMB showed concentration-, clade-, and isolate-dependent killing activity. AMB was fungicidal at 1 mg/L against two of six, two of four, three of six, and one of six isolates from the South Asian, East Asian, South African, and South American clades, respectively. Widefield fluorescence microscopy showed cell number decreases at 1 mg/L AMB in cases of the South Asian, East Asian, and South African clades. These data draw attention to the weak killing activity of AMB against C. auris regardless of clades, even when MICs are low (≤1 mg/L). Thus, AMB efficacy is unpredictable in treatment of invasive C. auris infections.

Introduction: Beyond the Anglophone—Comparative South Asian Literatures

Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community

Reviewed by: New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the U.S. Ketu H. Katrak (bio) New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the U.S. Edited by Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma . Palo Alto and London: Stanford University Press, 2006. New Cosmopolitanisms is an important and well-researched scholarly text that advances the dialogue between Asian American Studies and Diaspora and Globalization Studies. The text is a welcome addition to existing scholarship specifically in South Asian American Studies, such as texts by Rajini Srikanth, Sunaina Maira, and Karen Leonard, among others. New Cosmopolitanisms, a unique volume of six disciplinary and interdisciplinary essays, provides new illuminations to discussions of Bollywood cinema, religion, and museum collections on South Asia. The essays discuss visual and written media along with cultural expression in the practice of religion. Two essays worth noting for their original subject-matter in South Asian American Studies are Vidhya Dehejia's essay on how ethnic art is museumized and packaged for general consumption, and Dana S. Iyer and Nick Haslam's essay on eating disorders among South Asian American women. The editors, Rajan and Sharma, present an original rethinking of the notion of the cosmopolitan by defining "new cosmopolitans as people who blur the edges of home and abroad by continuously moving physically, culturally, and socially, and by selectively using globalized forms of travel, communication, languages, and technology to position themselves between two homes, sometimes even through dual forms of citizenship, but always in multiple locations" (2–3). This configuration differs from traditional notions of diaspora that usually describe people moving from one space to a different one that becomes home. On the other hand, contemporary cosmopolitans may have multiple homes and intervene socially both in homeland and adopted homes. They inhabit "diasporas in motion," which includes the movement of people and of "capital, technology, media forms." The editors aptly recognize that "the new partakes of the old," and ground [End Page 98] their discussion of new cosmopolitanism in the formative work of immigration scholars, historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics. In discussions of diaspora, the dimension of class is often left out. Its inclusion is an important contribution of this volume that recognizes the new cosmopolitans as belonging to different classes—professional middle class, the wealthy, and working class. This provides a strikingly different picture from the dark-suited cosmopolitan, mostly of an elite class, sometimes also an exile or expatriate. In the contemporary moment, South Asian-origin folks of different classes and generations partake equally of the South Asian homeland captured on Bollywood cinema, or in religious practice in temples, mosques, and prayer halls, or in satisfying nostalgia for South Asian foods. Their participation in U.S. public life, although described as a "new trend," is not entirely so, although perhaps more visible now than in earlier times as researched by scholars such as Karen Leonard and Susan Koshy. The editors also subtly point to a paradoxical reality of "shifting relationships between class and privilege that account for this group's success, which coexists with a level of invisibility" (7). Iftikhar Dadi's essay on "The Pakistani Diaspora in North America" traces the complex history of Muslim identity. Dadi explores how the older paradigms of "diasporic cultural expressivity" in literary texts are being "supplemented by new expressive possibilities that are enacted at the popular level in various media, in activism, as well as in academia" (37). Dadi usefully articulates the problem of referring only to India in discussions of South Asia, leaving Pakistan out along with other nations that constitute the sub-continent. This essay discusses the constitution of the Pakistani diaspora, nationalism and cultural expression, class, gender, and religion, political activism by exemplary figures such as the late Eqbal Ahmad. Dadi closes with a very useful section on "the Aftermath of September 11" that provides extensive references on the racial profiling of Pakistani-Americans and other South Asian Americans. "Identity and Visibility: Reflections on Museum Displays of South Asian Art" by Vidhya Dehejia explores the activity of museum curators in dealing with South Asian art, its selection process and target audiences. Muslim art is situated in the important contemporary context of "cosmopolitanism." Deheja reminds us that "Asian" art in museums mostly...