South Asian Women in the Diaspora

Nirmal Puwar, Parvati Raghuram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000190274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

South Asian women have frequently been conceptualized in colonial, academic and postcolonial studies, but their very categorization is deeply problematic. This book, informed by theory and enriched by in-depth fieldwork, overturns these unhelpful categorizations and alongside broader issues of self and nation assesses how South Asian identities are 'performed'. What are the blind spots and erasures in existing studies of both race and gender? In what ways do South Asian women struggle with Orientalist constructions? How do South Asian women engage with 'indo-chic?' What dilemmas face the South Asian female scholar? With a combination of the most recent feminist perspectives on gender and the South Asian diaspora, questions of knowledge, power, space, body, aesthetics and politics are made central to this book. Building upon a range of experiences and reflecting on the actual conditions of the production of knowledge, South Asian Women in the Disapora represents a challenging contribution to any consideration of gender, race, culture and power.

—1— (Dis)locating South Asian Women in the Academy

Nirmal Puwar and Parvati Raghuram

Spaces of agency exist for black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see (hooks 1991: 199).

This collection looks back at the ways in which the figure of the South Asian woman has been seen and seeks new ways of looking ‘at one another’ without having to resort to the simplicity of good and bad images. It names the complexity of what it sees from a space that is alert to the objectifying tendencies of so much knowledge on the Other, while recognizing that it is neither pure nor totally separated from its viewing position. We begin in this introduction by situating the chapters that make up this volume, within histories of academic knowledge.

The Arrival of Difference within Academia

Two types of change in relation to the teaching of and research into ‘race’ and ethnicity are fairly evident from a quick overview of the academy today in comparison to that of twenty years ago. First, bodies of thought have been widened and new perspectives and terminologies have challenged essentialist and pathologizing thinking. Most institutions have at the very least introduced optional modules on ‘race’ and ethnicity, and a few have even placed this field of study within the compulsory aspects of their curriculum. Research agendas have also been stretched to accommodate questions of ‘race’ and ethnicity. While it is still no doubt de rigeur for these issues to be ignored in the conduct of day-to-day scholarship, nevertheless funding is now available for scholars who do want to grant consideration to questions of race in their research. And in fact, in line with the rise of new specialisms constituted in journals, curricula and conference themes, the umbrella terms ‘race’ and ethnicity have now mutated into a plethora of research sub-fields, such as diaspora, transnational communities, migration, whiteness and social exclusion. Each of these is in turn embedded in the study of specific ethnicities and regions, such as South Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific Rim.

In the USA, where there are more scholars and institutes involved with the topic, the whole area of South Asian studies is much more established than in the UK. There is also a historical difference in the disciplinary location of these studies. In the USA much of it is based in Area Studies. In the UK, while there is a strong tradition of South Asian Studies, firmly established in elite institutions like the School of Oriental and African Studies and Cambridge University, there is at the same time a great deal of thought being generated out of more general work on ‘race’, which has a much wider scope than Area Studies. So while we are witnessing the emergence of South Asian studies in the UK, through specialist conferences, journals and research projects in a fashion that bears some resemblance to institutional developments in the USA, much of the scholarship maintains strong links and conversations with other scholars working on ‘race’ generally, even if their focus is on the African diaspora rather than the South Asian diaspora. The differences in classed migratory histories between the USA and the UK also means that there are more South Asians in the United States with the cultural and class capital that enables them firstly to enter higher education as students and then to become members of the academy. This difference is exacerbated by the privileging of the South Asian migrant experience in the UK by researchers in the USA, many of whom travel to the UK to do fieldwork. Interestingly, this travelling for research and objectification through research is less likely to occur in the opposite direction.¹

The second significant change that has taken place alongside the widening of bodies of thought on ‘race’ and ethnicity in academia is a diversification in the actual bodies that study, research and teach in the humanities and social sciences. The number of students from ‘black’² and ethnic minority backgrounds has increased, especially within metropolitan cities, where they represent a substantial proportion of the student population. Alongside the increasing presence of ‘home-grown’ black students in the academy there has also been an increase in the number of students from Third World countries in Western academic institutions. One impact of globalization has been a growth in recognition of the importance of being at the ‘core’ of global knowledge production at the same time as recruiting abroad has become a major strategy for many universities that are struggling for students in the UK. Thus bodies within the academy have been diversified by a ‘black British’ presence, but also by an overseas contingent from the ‘Third World’.

The whiteness of academia is also interrupted now and then by the existence of lecturers of colour. In the UK both lecturers and the students are concentrated in the less prestigious and less financially lucrative sector of higher education, namely the ‘new universities’. A racialized hierarchy can also be observed across the scale, with a tiny number of professors at the top of the scale and an ever-increasing number of people from the racialized ethnic minority group at the bottom, especially in the category of temporary researchers. Gender further complicates the ways in which ‘race’ impacts upon employment opportunities within academia. ‘Black’ women are once again, rather depressingly, more likely to be found on the lower rungs of higher education institutions (Modood and Fenton 1999), with a notable presence of South Asian women as researchers.

Impure Bodies in the Academy

By noting the structural marginality of South Asian women in academia, we are not intending rather predictably to utilize the race-gender-class mantra in simplistic terms to invest women of colour with a moral and political superiority that positions them as victims or innocent subjects. The claim of unfettered marginality risks masking the particular and indeed different power relations South Asian women in the academy are themselves inscribed within. There are after all no ‘non-contaminated’ (Rajan 1993: 8), ‘insulated’ pure spaces that are altogether outside what we criticize (Grosz 1995: 62–3).

Furthermore, the geometries of global power relations have never presented us with South Asian women as an entity. The figure of the South Asian woman could in itself be said to be a contested term in its imperious sweep across nations and communities. Differences of power mean that not only are ‘we’ referring to a heterogeneous figure, but also to an assortment of women who are more often than not positioned in contradistinction to each other. By speaking of South Asian women in the diaspora we are not aiming to forge a version of international feminism that has been rightly criticized by Kaplan for seeking a ‘transnational fiesta of differences’ while mystifying and codifying power relations within these collectivities (1994: 141). The very writing of this text, no doubt, relies on different sets of cultural, symbolic and economic capital (Bourdieu 1992), located within ‘the machineries of literacy and education, which are affordable only to a privileged few’ (Chow 1993: 119). Trying to be alert to ‘. . . the difference that separates those who speak and those who are spoken of/for ’ (Chow 1993: 114), we are not in the business of setting up our own authorial subject ‘as the implicit referent’ (Mohanty 1988: 64) for all South Asian women.

This collection originally took its shape in Britain, but has been augmented through contributions from scholars situated in North America and India. Amongst the twelve contributors the migratory histories are diverse, with some being of the first generation of migrants and others of the second. Differences of class also inform the web of diasporic connections that are bought to bear upon the debates within the chapters; some have migrated as scholars and others are the daughters of working-class parents. What is common to the authors and to the themes they address, however, is a sense that they are all implicated in the figure of the South Asian woman as found in academic discourses. They have all used their space within the academy to write a new language through which the complex subjectivities of diasporic South Asian women may be grasped.

The growth of bodies of colour within the academy has no doubt played a decisive role in widening current frameworks of thought. The publication of The Empire Strikes Back (CCCS 1982), for instance, was incredibly significant for unsettling long established dicta and for moving the terrain on to new agendas. While this text was predominantly (but not exclusively) generated by ‘black’ scholars, the development of a wider body of thought is not necessarily linked to the presence of ‘black’ bodies. ‘Black’ scholars are perfectly capable of reproducing paradigms that are problematically located in the long routes of wisdom for questions of ‘race’ and ethnicity (Mohanty 1988: 62), just as white intellectuals are able to innovate the terms of debate. The mediated nature of experience teaches us that there is ‘no necessary or essential correspondence’ of anything with anything in terms of a mimetic link between background and politics (Hall 1990). The racialized position of the author thus has no direct bearing upon the political position of the text. There are however reasons why the embodied features of an author cannot altogether be disregarded, even though these reasons cannot be a priori determined. Grosz (1995) states ‘. . .there are ways in which the sexuality and corporeality of the subject leave their traces or marks on the texts produced, just as we in turn must recognize that the processes of textual production also leave their trace or residue on the body of the writer (and readers)’ (p. 21). How and indeed what kind of traces are borne is of course specific to context.

Natives in the Academy

In an essay that discusses the dynamics involved in the recruitment of a Chinese scholar from mainland China in her faculty in a Northern American University, Rey Chow offers an observant analysis of how academics respond to the presence within the academy of members of racialized ethnic minorities who have for centuries been objects of study. She notes that for scholars who have invested whole lifetimes in constructing ideal types of these different ‘others’ and their communities, the entry of these ‘ethnic’ others can be disturbing, because they may well find that the frameworks they developed to make sense of these people no longer seem to fit. Thus as ‘ethnics’ enter the academy as something other than pure specimens, what ‘confronts the Western scholar is the discomforting fact that the natives are no longer staying in their frames’ (Chow 1993: 28). The different institutional histories of how particular natives have been ‘known’ across different parts of the West and within specific disciplines require close attention. There is, for instance, more of a trend to recruit ‘indigenous’ scholars to teach subjects such as Indian or Chinese studies in the United States than there is in the United Kingdom; differing colonial histories have much to do with these institutional directions.

At the present moment the entry of South Asian women, who are either home-grown within the West or from the Indian subcontinent, into different locales in Western academia has resulted in a degree of disorientation among those who have studied them in factories, picket lines, youth clubs, women’s refuges or development projects. They find that what they have in front of them are entities that are not quite as they had ‘imagined’. In lecture halls, canteens and staff meetings scholars find that while these ‘specimens’ can incite an unhealthy level of ‘fascination’ in times of global multiculturalism, they can also disappoint those who thought they ‘knew’ them even before they actually met them. The complicated mix of personalities and traits found in South Asian women can cause great disturbance for academics, and this trauma can continue long after they have become versed in post-colonial theory, which is well versed in the ins and out of impure and nomadic life.

What remains particularly problematic for many of the scholars who are schooled in the attributes of South Asian women is the claim that experience matters. Accusations of essentialism, with images of ‘black power’ and Malcolm X in the not too distant background, are accompanied by a sense of suspicion for those who seek recognition for racialized embodied existence. While I believe that experience is not ‘a guarantor of some essential authenticity’, at the same time we support Brah’s assertion that ‘there is a qualitative difference when this changing fiction we call “I” or “Me” is directly subjected within specific discursive practices. This experience matters’ (Brah 1996: 9). As some South Asian women acquire the cultural capital to engage intellectually with the texts and debates in which they have been theorized and described, what we are finding the need for is serious scrutiny of the ‘frames’ in which they are received. This collection has emerged from South Asian women located within the academy, who have sought to make sense of their own lives, as well as those of their mothers, sisters and grandmothers, and found the current frameworks patronizing and/or unwieldy for discussing the pressures, joys, structures and negotiations they want to develop a language for. With the condescending attitudes found in texts also articulated in the coffee rooms and staff meetings of academia, the need to pose some challenges has become all the more pressing. Calls for a ‘change in the narrative’ (Bhattacharya 1998: 36) have indeed been made by a long and evolving tradition of women of colour in the academy.

Institutional Streamlining

The institutional streamlining of disciplines has made it difficult for students to gain a complex understanding of the locations and subjectivities of South Asian women. The life of this book started in a workshop that was organized on ‘Theoretical Considerations of Gender and the South Asian Diaspora’ (Leicester University, 1999). This event was widely advertised through electronic and print networks; most of these were initially academic, but they soon spread into other types of organizations. It was also only open to those who defined themselves as ‘South Asian Women’; and there were specific reasons for this. Although within feminist circles writings by and on South Asian women are becoming fairly prolific, in academic forums South Asian women find that much of their energy is still being taken up by (1) insisting that ‘race’ and difference need to be considered, and (2) on explaining ‘what it is like to be a South Asian woman’. Between providing testimony and clamouring for the recognition of ‘race’ very little space remains within these forums for the concerns of South Asian women. Converseley in the growing area of South Asian studies, while ‘race’ is automatically taken account of, gender has to be asserted. Rather like the area of subaltern studies where gender issues are treated as a bit of a ‘red herring’ (Spivak 1988: 218). This workshop was an attempt to get away from familiar scenarios where we are always explaining or battling but never quite arriving at the point of looking at the figure of the South Asian woman in-depth. The call for papers stressed that the discussions had to have a theoretical focus, and could not be purely empirical. An institutional history also lay behind this decision.

In a discussion of the whiteness of art spaces Sarat Maharaj speaks of a trend towards ‘multicultural managerialism’, based on an ‘administrative logic for regulating and managing cultural difference’ (1999: 7). Within this logic ‘black’ artists are pigeon-holed and straitjacketed. They are expected for instance to bring ethnic vibrancy and colour to the fie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 (Dis)locating South Asian Women in the Academy
• Part I South Asian Women and Paradigmatic (Im)possibilities
• Part II Embodying South Asian Femininities
• Part III Engagements
• Index