South Asian Diaspora Research Articles

Grief, vulnerability, and hope

For the four weeks prior to writing this editorial in mid-January, I have been on annual leave and have been determined to take those days for rest and recreation We are deeply grateful to those authors who have engaged with the call for papers and who have wrangled both with their own inner upsets - for there most certainly have been those - and with the additional complexities the pandemic has wrought Following these six articles is a small special section of three other articles based on work originally presented at the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers Conference in Cardiff in 2018 [Extracted from the article] Copyright of Geographical Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use This abstract may be abridged No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract (Copyright applies to all Abstracts )

Introduction – South Asian Diasporas and (imaginary) homelands: why representations still matter

ABSTRACT This special issue of South Asian Diaspora explores how films, literature, photography and social media construct and re-present narratives of homelands and diasporas, as well as investigating the ways which these same narratives are disseminated, appropriated and/or challenged in relation to recent political developments in South Asia and in the diaspora. By focusing on a spectrum of different media of communications, the articles collected in this special issue pose the work of representation at the centre of diasporic politics as they investigate the ways in which representations inform the ways in which diasporic subjects (writers, filmmakers, social media users, etc.) imagine themselves as well as their homelands.

«Other Africans»: Kenyan diaspora in Great Britain

The article is devoted to the study of the Kenyan diaspora of modern Great Britain. The study provides details on the background, main reasons and channels of migration of Kenyans to the UK. The main emphasis is placed on the study of the specifics of immigrants from Kenya, their ethnic composition, gender and age structure, socio-economic indicators. By the end of the colonial era, a de facto regime of racial segregation had been established in Kenya. The main ethnic groups - Europeans, Indians and Africans - actually lived in closed enclaves. It was Europeans and South Asians who made up the backbone of postcolonial migration from this African country. The process of Africanization in the young Kenyan state provoked the massive migration of Indian Kenyans to Great Britain in the 1960-1970s. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the practice of material assistance of British Kenyans to their relatives in Kenya. They are in regular contact with each other, maintaining strong bonds. Private remittances from abroad are one of the main sources of investment in the Kenyan economy in the 2000s and 2010s. Migration to the UK is seen by many Kenyans as a temporary and forced measure, which does not exclude the possibility of returning to their historical homeland. By the nature of settlement, birth rate, material well-being and the degree of success, immigrants from Kenya are close to the South Asian diasporas in the United Kingdom. An education, proficiency in English, together with a general loyalty to British culture, contributes to the rapid and painless integration of Kenyans into the host society.

Global Hindu Communities: Constructing a World Religion in the South Asian Diaspora

Global Hindu Communities: Constructing a World Religion in the South Asian Diaspora

Re-orientalism in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s The Selector of Souls

In his seminal work Orientalism Edward Said destabilized the Euro-American practice of constructing, approving and disseminating a stereotypical image of Asia as exotic backward called the ‘Orient’. This paper takes Said’s concept of Orientalism as a premise to highlight ‘self–orientalism’ or ‘re-Orientalism’ as a growing trend in South Asian diaspora writers, especially since the turn of the 21st century. It utilizes the idea of orientalism and reads Shauna Singh Baldwin’s The Selector of Souls against the grain to accentuate the reification of Indian culture into a commodity and homogenisation of complex cultural differences in multicultural India for the consumption of the West. In its effort to find answers for this growing trend, it analyses the nexus between location and commodification of literature produced by diaspora writers.

Looking Backward to a Distant Land: South Asian Diaspora and Function of Nostalgia in “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs,” “Mrs. Sen’s” and The Inheritance of Loss

A tendency of the protagonists of South Asian diaspora literatures is to look backward to their left behind land in nostalgic reminiscence. This nostalgic reminiscence, however, should not be thought of as a debilitating form of escapism; instead, the diasporic protagonists’ nostalgia offers valuable insights into their present condition of disenfranchisement. In this paper, analyzing the diasporic experiences of the protagonists of three literary works of South Asian diaspora—Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs,” Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s” and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, I contend that exclusion from first-class citizenship rights, marginalization and the inability to exercise rights and power result in a sense of alienation in the protagonists which consequently lead them to be nostalgic. Simultaneously, I challenge the general tendency of seeing nostalgia as a mere uncritical yearning for the lost home, and using Iris Marion Young’s institutional racism theory and the theories of Stuart Tannock and Fred Davis on nostalgia, I advocate to see nostalgia from a more critical angle — where nostalgia not only functions as active critique but is also instrumental in unveiling the protagonists’ desire for equality and empowerment.

One Size Does Not Fit All: Diabetes Prevalence Among Immigrants of the South Asian Diaspora.

The risk of diabetes is higher in South Asians compared to the general population. As a result of migration during the twentieth-century postindependence, the South Asian diaspora is incredibly vast. We examined the diabetes prevalence between groups of the South Asian diaspora based on their distinct migration patterns. Population-based health care and immigration administrative data were used to compare crude and standardized diabetes prevalence between immigrants from nine regions of the South Asian diaspora and the non-immigrant population. Diabetes prevalence across groups were also stratified by gender. There were 199,003 South Asian immigrants; 33,882 (crude prevalence of 17.0%) of whom had a diagnosis of diabetes. The nine subgroups varied significantly in the prevalence of diabetes after adjusting for age, sex and income: Sri Lanka 24.3%, Pakistan 22.2%, Fiji 21.5%, Bangladesh 20.7%, the Caribbean 20.4%, India 16.0%, East Africa 13.8%, South Africa 10.8%, and the Middle East 9.6% in comparison to the non-immigrant population 17.8%. Higher prevalence was evident among men compared with women in each subgroup with the exception of Pakistan.Diabetes prevalence is not uniform among South Asians. Our findings highlight potential impacts of their unique migration histories on the risk and burden of diabetes, and move beyond a one size fits all approach in the South Asian population of Ontario to develop targeted interventions.

Indian Classical Dance Education in Diaspora

How can teaching dance in the South Asian diaspora influence dance education in the United States? In this article, I reflect on my foray into the diasporic community as an Indian classical dance educator to provide concrete examples of how this material is translatable in mainstream dance training. By focusing on my training within and teaching of the eastern Indian form called Odissi, I argue that the teaching and learning of postural, gestural, and expressive motifs simultaneously remain culturally embedded within the Indian apprentice-learning model alongside adapting to the needs of changing cultural milieu of the diaspora. From my experiential narratives, I present practical recommendations not only to Indian classical dance educators, but to all dance teachers who, I believe, will benefit from a culturally embedded system of teaching and learning kinesthetic concepts and embodied execution.

Cricket, an oddity in the Arab-Gulf lands or a mirror of an enduring South Asian diaspora?

The article highlights the apparent anomaly of the rise of cricket in the Arab-Gulf region. It argues that the evolution of cricket in the six Gulf Cooperative Council countries (GCC) from essentially an expatriate sport to its status today, with evident strengths and weaknesses, reflects the quality of the consolidation of the South Asian community, and especially of the Indian diaspora. The relationship between sports and the diaspora remains relatively unexplored. Using an empirical and comparative method, the paper adds to the current literature by studying the link between cricket and the diaspora in the Gulf region.

Picturing Resistance and Resilience: South Asian Identities in the Work of Chila Kumari Burman

The issues of migration and the allocation of passports is a contentious issue in twenty-first-century Britain. This paper offers a timely assessment of Chila Kumari Burman’s diptych, Convenience, Not Love, 1986–7, which uses the passport motif to present a scathing indictment of British immigration policy in the post-1945 era, which champions the resilience of the British South Asian diaspora in the face of persistent racial discrimination. Taking issue with the stereotype of South Asian women as ‘meek and passive victims’, the paper concludes with a discussion of Burman’s self-portraits from the 1990s, proposing them as ‘radically narcissistic’.

Imaginaries of a Vision

Imaginaries of a Vision

Hearts in other places: Cinema of the South Asian diaspora

Hearts in other places: Cinema of the South Asian diaspora

Refusal/film: diasporic-indigenous relationalities

ABSTRACTThis essay situates the cultural-political practices of non-Indigenous, racialized diasporas with Audra Simpson’s concept of refusal. I frame diasporic film that generates alternatives to settler colonial relationships and imaginaries in terms of ongoing practices of diasporic refusal. To elaborate on what this refusal can look like, I turn to South Asian Canadian filmmaker Ali Kazimi’s experimental documentary Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas (1997), a profile of Iroquois photographer Jeffrey Thomas that self-reflexively explores the politics of spectatorship and representation through an examination of Native subjects of Edward Curtis’ portrait series. Understanding Shooting Indians’ refusal requires not only an analysis of its representational politics, but the contextualization of the film as (a) a generative effect of South Asian diasporic artists in Toronto engaging questions of Indigenous sovereignty and relationality through art and community discussion, and (b) as itself opening possibilities for continued conversations and cultural production among South Asian diasporas and Indigenous peoples in Toronto.

Introduction: Sign and Script in South Asia

This essay introduces a collection of six articles that analyze the political economy of language and script in relation to the emergence and contestation of identities and publics in contemporary India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and South Asian diasporas. Social media and the virtual forums that they enable have inspired new representational practices and discursive possibilities that are in dialogue with older ways of ordering difference. Rather than making a hard-and-fast distinction between new and old media, this issue draws on the rich visual tapestries of South Asia to examine implicit and explicit debates over codes, scripts, and sign language systems in relation to different forms of print and digital media, from street signs to social media posts. We demonstrate the centrality of visual semiotic systems in processes of political, economic, and sociocultural change in contemporary South Asia.

Lord Ram Plays the Parking Lot: Ramlila in the Diaspora

Since 2010 the authors have been involved in the production and performance of the Morrisville, North Carolina Ramlila. In 2018 we conducted a participant-ethnography of the production. Many Hindu communities in India and in the South-Asian diaspora have created their own unique Ramlila productions, all of which are to some extent based on Maharishi Valmiki's millennia-old Sanskrit epic, the Rāmāyan.a. The events of the story are dictated largely by religious tradition, but there is surprising variation in the textual and cinematic sources used to generate the performance's spoken dialogues. The Hindu Society of North Carolina began mounting its Ramlila as a small-scale pageant in 2009, but in subsequent years it has grown to be a large-scale production that attracts thousands of audience members. In our study we examine the evolution of the dramatic structure of the play as performed in Morrisville, the group dynamics of the production team and actors, gender roles in the cast and production team, and the aesthetic and political debates that inform the work. We argue that not only does this drama play an important role in forging community identity among North Carolinian South Asians, but also sometimes works to inscribe deeper tensions within the community concerning the meaning of the epic with respect to gender, ethnicity, and transmitted moral values.

Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora Narratives. From the Eighteenth Century to Monica Ali

Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora Narratives. From the Eighteenth Century to Monica Ali

Panoptic spaces and the framings of South Asian diaspora in Jhumpa Lahiri’s selected short stories

This article carries out a (con-) textual analysis of cultural crossings, with a particular focus on the notions of assimilation and syncretism, in certain of Jhumpa Lahiri’s diasporic writings. By...

Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies the Birth of an Authentic Indian Diasporic Icon

The South Asian diaspora has been in motion for centuries, far before large parts of the region came under the rule of the British East India Company, and later the Crown itself. Within nations themselves, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, physical features, and religion, among many other things, work to shape unique experience. Any notion of South Asian, or even Indian, “authenticity” is fraught from the start. Authenticity is contextually specific in practice, and yet theorized in broad terms. Identity is overwhelmingly intersectional, and so any notion of essentialism, while an interesting thought experiment, is largely useless and untrue to human experience. Familiarized authenticity sells; radical and nuanced authenticity is a risk. It is essential then to consider the modes of canonization, and how and why certain authors are given the powerful title of “authentically South Asian.” As such Lahiri’s success is dependent on her work and her image remaining universal enough that innumerable versions of authenticity may be placed upon her. This paper explores why she functions as a fruitful case study for the construction of Indian diasporic authenticity by looking at her biography, and prolific career. It also provides an alternate analysis of agency she and her agent have in this situation by considering the para text of her novel Interpreter of Maladies.

DDT linked to type 2 diabetes risk

People who have immigrated to the US from South Asia have a high risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared with the rest of the population, and public health researchers have been searching for an explanation. Initial results from a study of immigrants from India living in the San Francisco Bay Area suggest a provocative one: exposure to the pesticide DDT (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2019, DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.9b03373). Type 2 diabetes in South Asia and in the South Asian diaspora is a large and growing problem. An estimated 80 million people in India have the disease. South Asians are a rapidly growing immigrant group in the US, and 23% of them have type 2 diabetes. “This high risk of diabetes in South Asian immigrants is not explained by obesity,” a condition commonly associated with diabetes, says Michele La Merrill, an environmental toxicologist at the University of California, Davis. “People have been

Diasporic culinary trajectories: Mapping food zones and food routes in first-generation South Asian and Caribbean culinary memoirs

ABSTRACTThis article examines two culinary memoirs that belong to two distinct postcolonial diasporas, the Caribbean, through a focus on Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails ‘n’ Breadfruit, and the South Asian diaspora, through a focus on Madhur Jaffrey’s Climbing the Mango Trees. As a South Asian diasporan, Jaffrey maps Delhi as a multicultural, pluri-faith town, with distinct (food) areas, to reflect contemporary views of the nation as diversity/unity, and define herself as a Muslim-Hindu hybrid. Austin Clarke maps food circulation within and from the Caribbean as a way to address the issues of human (forced) migrations and highlight continuity in the colonial logics of exploitation. By refusing to trace food routes to Africa, Clarke draws attention to native resistance and culinary and linguistic resilience. One memoir (Jaffrey) chooses métissage, the other (Clarke) creolization. Both illustrate how the culinary memoir engages the reader by offering an ethics of eating and cooking together.