Reading Together, Reading Apart

Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community

Tamara Bhalla

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780252098925
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Often thought of as a solitary activity, the practice of reading can in fact encode the complex politics of community formation. Engagement with literary culture represents a particularly integral facet of identity formation--and expresses of a sense of belonging--within the South Asian diaspora in the United States.Tamara Bhalla blends a case study with literary and textual analysis to illuminate this phenomenon. Her fascinating investigation considers institutions from literary reviews to the marketplace to social media and other technologies, as well as traditional forms of literary discussion like book clubs and academic criticism. Throughout, Bhalla questions how her subjects' circumstances, desires, and shared race and class, limit the values they ascribe to reading. She also examines how ideology circulating around a body of literature or a self-selected, imagined community of readers shapes reading itself and influences South Asians' powerful, if contradictory, relationship with ideals of cultural authenticity.

1

THE GLUE THAT KEEPS US TOGETHER

Constructing Ethnic Community in the NetSAP Book Club

“I have this need to identify with my culture, and I have this need to talk to people who I don’t have to give South Asian 101 to, who can identify with the same things,” says Ajay, a medical school student, during an interview, midday on a weekend at busy coffee shop in suburban Maryland. Ajay and I spent the better part of his interview discussing why he initially joined the NetSAP book club. He emphasized that the shared practice of reading in the club fulfilled his longing to be part of a local, coethnic community and explained that literature with South Asian themes provided a common denominator capable of bringing young, professional South Asians in the DC area together in a setting where they were able to identify with each other. Similarly, during another interview, when Arya, a Punjabi-American woman, began explaining why transnational South Asian literature brought NetSAP book club members together—and more generally why this literature might offer such a compelling site of community formation for South Asians in the United States—she noted, “I think for South Asians, there’s a very strong and passionate identification: this is who I am. It’s really personal. […] We’re just very sensitive to how we’re portrayed.” Members reflected on their participation in the group in interviews and book club meetings. In one such circumstance, when the discussion came around to the topic of why South Asian Americans are so invested in positive literary representations, Maya offered, “I feel like I very rarely meet a South Asian who doesn’t take criticisms of the country personally. And I really do wonder, are people from Mexico, [for example], that way?” (NetSAP book club meeting, The Marriage Bureau for Rich People). As is evident in all of these comments, NetSAP book club participants’ practices of reading are self-consciously mediated by their shared ethnic identity and cluster around issues of identification, representation, and community formation.1

At the most basic level, Ajay, Arya, and Maya characterize their investment in transnational South Asian literary culture in terms of affiliation—both kinship with particular kinds of literary representations and with other South Asians. They seek out fellow readers who are ethnically and culturally similar, slip between “I” and “we” to explain South Asian diasporic sensitivities, and question why representational concerns are so prevalent among members of the ethnic community. Their comments attest to an overall sensitivity in the group to the representational stakes of transnational South Asian literature. However, rather than denying the representational quandaries that this literature might present, NetSAP book club members engage with them by explicitly framing their practice of reading through both individual and collective language. That is, they generalize about their personal experiences of reading in order to connect their own responses to those of a broader South Asian American community of readers. Their comments open a view into the central question of this chapter: what do practices of reading in the NetSAP book club tell us about the possibilities and limitations of constructing South Asian American community as an expression of shared ethnicity?

Like the practice of reading, the formation of community is almost always evoked as an undeniable good. As Miranda Joseph explains, the concept of community is idealized as “an indicator of a high quality of life, a life of human understanding, caring, selflessness, belonging” (vii)—qualities that are, notably, also associated with the practice of reading. And yet, as with reading, the values that drive the formation of community only become visible when we begin to examine the circumstances that allow for the production of particular communities.2 A shared identity is often thought to be the bond that unites members of a community. But studying the practices of reading in the NetSAP book club demonstrates that, in keeping with Joseph’s arguments, communities are constituted not solely through celebratory notions of shared identity but also through various acts of production and consumption (viii). In the communal reading culture of the NetSAP book club, shared South Asian ethnic identity may ostensibly function as the primary and most obvious criterion for membership (aside from professional status which, as I discuss in chapter 2, works as a more tacit bonding mechanism in this group). And yet through their practices of reading, which involve, at least partially, their consumption of transnational South Asian literature, members of the book club continually question the cohesion of South Asian ethnic identity in the United States.

Because ambivalence about what constitutes South Asian identity itself prevails among South Asians in the United States, it is unsurprising that South Asian forms of belonging and community provide a compelling object of inquiry in the NetSAP book club. As I discuss in the introduction, the term “South Asian” itself, just like any form of community that it might describe, is itself aspirational (Mani, Aspiring 14). One of the most problematic features of the term is that it effaces the particularities of South Asian experience in the United States in order to name and thereby facilitate a unified sense of South Asian American identity and community. This flattening of difference among South Asians in the United States not only tends to cast Indians as the dominant ethnic group but also promotes middle- and upper-middle-class experiences as representative of South Asian American culture. The concept of South Asian American identity thereby takes on an interpellative function: it offers a paradigm of belonging that is primarily appealing to middle- and upper-class South Asians of the second and third generations (Mani, Aspiring 14). For these South Asian subjects, the concept of a South Asian panethnic identity is a more legible construct than it is for working-class and first-generation South Asians whose regional, national, religious, or linguistic origins tend to govern their affiliations. And so the conceptualization of South Asian identity in the United States paradoxically encompasses a progressive politics based in a desire for ethnic solidarity and an erasure of those South Asians who do not embrace a panethnic identity.

Ideals of community and the parameters of South Asian ethnic identity are thus concepts that are fraught, fluid, and constructed. In this chapter, I argue that the practice of reading in the NetSAP book club embodies the broader ambivalence of South Asian American belonging and community formation under the conditions of neoliberal multiculturalism. South Asian American ethnic identity formation both in the book club and beyond it is bolstered and depoliticized through discourses of community. As a microcosm of the dilemmas of South Asian American community formation, the NetSAP book club encapsulates the contradictions between South Asian Americans’ desire for heterogeneous and inclusive forms of ethnic community and their tendency to homogenize South Asian American experience within book club discussions. Bakirathi Mani has noted that middle- and upper-middle-class South Asians tend to be complicit with “nationalist discourses in the United States and the subcontinent” even while resisting such frameworks of belonging. Mani describes this oscillation as central to the formation of South Asian community in the United States (Aspiring 15). In this chapter, I study how NetSAP book club participants’ practices of reading, communally and individually, exemplify these contradictions of South Asian American community formation.

Specifically, I trace how the NetSAP book club is constituted through the contradictions of community as a site of inclusion and exclusion. It is formed between the aspirational ideals of South Asian American community and belonging as progressive, inclusive, politically engaged and its often depoliticized, homogenizing, and conformist actualization. I argue that the contradictions between NetSAP’s structure and practice is indicative of the impact of neoliberal multiculturalist ideologies on South Asian American community formation.

As Jodi Melamed explains, neoliberal multiculturalism unites the free market ideology of neoliberalism with the tokenistic racial pluralism of multiculturalism (138). Although Melamed does not specifically refer to ethnically marked elites as neoliberal multiculturalists, such elites, like the members of the NetSAP book club, may well fall into this category. In fact, Melamed’s argument is very instructive for an analysis of how the economic privilege of South Asian readers in this book club ambivalently regulates their reading preferences, drawing them to literature that they deem ethnically authentic. Under the auspices of neoliberal multiculturalism, literature has become a vital tool for the education of a professional-managerial class of transnational elites that influences their “self-making” (141).

In other words, reading together in the NetSAP book club is a cultural practice that allows this set of South Asians in the United States to try on different versions of South Asian identity among fellow South Asians. They use the book club, in both form and practice, not simply to instantiate a simplistic identity politics but also to debate which versions of South Asian identity feel “realistic,” authentic, and which versions ease their sense of belonging and cultural citizenship in the United States. Through the organizational, structural features of the book club, members insist on the value of transnational perspectives and project ideals of South Asian heterogeneity and inclusion.3 These organizational elements, such as the book club’s mission statement, its connection to federally funded institutions (like NetIP and the Smithsonian), and the online publication of reading lists provide the reading group with a cohesive public image not only within the South Asian American community but among non-South Asians as well. These governing features of the book club are elements that its participants literally build together, and they function as public expressions of their literary preferences and their desire for a diverse South Asian community; they are the means through which the group establishes a community-based canon that anchors the collective expression of their tastes to ideals of South Asian heterogeneity, progress, and inclusion.

However, when they discuss and debate literature in the coethnic space of the book club, their endogamous process of community formation at times draws on depoliticized, nationalist, and limiting notions of what it means to be South Asian in the diaspora. That is, in the conversational elements of book club culture—such as participants’ interpretive practices of reading in the book club meetings themselves—the ideals of the book club’s infrastructure are occluded. In interviews, in particular, I found that NetSAP book club participants were reluctant to politicize their membership in it as an act of racial coalition and emphasized instead the value of shared culture, homogenous community, and coethnic familiarity. In this way, their reading practice conforms to Susan Koshy’s foundational work on South Asian American constructions of race and ethnicity in which she argues that there is a long history of South Asians in the United States avoiding racial stigma through the assertion of ethnic and cultural difference (“Category” 285).4 The emphasis on shared ethnicity in the NetSAP book club parallels the construction of South Asian American identity in multicultural American society, allowing for the articulation and suppression of intraethnic differences within the group and functioning as a crucial feature in the dialectic of American identity formation. But at the same time, the emphasis on shared ethnicity and common culture in the book club reveals the autoessentializing effects of neoliberal multiculturalist ideology within this coethnic community. In this vein, the focus on a shared, uniform ethnicity can also emerge as an act of containment, self-management, and limitation.

In the first section of the chapter, I examine how the organizing elements of the NetSAP book club—its mission statement, its connection to governmentally funded structures of NetIP, its decade-long involvement with the Smithsonian Institution through the South Asian Literature and Arts Festival (SALTAF), and the online publication of its community-selected reading lists—project the aspirations of South Asian American community formation through ideals of heterogeneity and inclusion.5 In the second section of the chapter, I trace how the imagined community of the NetSAP book club calls forth a sense of South Asian community founded primarily in a desire for coethnic familiarity. In this section, I argue that participants’ reflections on the importance of coethnic South Asian community complicate the heterogeneous, politicized ideals of the book club’s infrastructure. In the final section of the chapter, I examine how this contradiction between aspiration and actuality played out in a book club meeting on Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet: Bangalore Stories (2005). In this meeting, readers reconfirmed their ethnic community through representations of South Asian experience with which they were familiar and were collectively confounded by those that did not fit as well into dominant paradigms of South Asian American identity. This discomfort suggests that the intractable discourses of neoliberal multiculturalism—which are generally associated with the management of interethnic and interracial difference—also regulate how South Asians relate to one another through a desire for both familiarity and otherness even in an intraethnic space such as the NetSAP book club.

Ideals of Organization and the Making of a Community-Based Canon

The NetSAP book club was founded on the belief that its most crucial function was to bring South Asians together to build community around a shared cultural and ethnic heritage. In an extensive interview and over the course of many informal conversations, Sri, the NetSAP book club’s founder and leader for a decade, explained to me that the original members of the reading group first met as part of a mentoring program for women called Indus Women Leaders (IWL). IWL, active since 2003, is an organization whose mission is “to create a community of strong South Asian women leaders who are comfortable sharing their challenges and dreams so they can encourage one another.”6 As Sri explains, many of her friends in IWL were also involved in NetSAP and shared an interest in business and professional mentoring. A close friend of hers who was a fellow member of both groups suggested that they start a book club as part of NetSAP’s cultural arm. After a few months Sri’s friend dropped out, and she took over. As she explains, the book group “evolved” and became a “very consistent” part of NetSAP DC, so much so, that the president of NetSAP DC asked Sri if the book club should be its own committee rather than remaining part of the cultural committee.

Despite the book club’s development in association with organizations that explicitly promote professional advancement, in all of my conversations with Sri, she, like other NetSAP book club participants, emphasized that the most unique and compelling feature of the book club is the shared ethnic background of the participants rather than their shared professional status. She explained that from the start the book club was designed to explicitly promote the ethnic commonality of NetSAP members as a unifying theme of the organization: “Over the years there were always different people that had said, ‘Well, you know, we should maybe read these other [non-South Asian] books.” And we said, “You know? We’re the NetSAP book club—what is it that we have in common? And what we have in common is we’re all South Asian.” Sri describes ethnic commonality as the “the glue that keeps us all together in the NetSAP book club.” In discussions with Sri and other NetSAP book club participants, it’s clear that even though NetSAP is a middle- and upper-middle-class institution, grounded as it is in professional networking and mentoring organizations, professional status remains secondary to how the reading group functions and perceives of itself as a group based in a sense of shared South Asian community.

Indeed, NetSAP DC’s website emphasizes the importance of establishing a South Asian community above any other shared value or service goal, including the development of a professional network.7 However, because it is a community built through a nonprofit, the version of South Asian American identity it emphasizes is connected to the bureaucratic, state-regulated apparatus of nonprofit organizations (Joseph 70). In other words, the affiliation between the NetSAP DC book club and the NetSAP DC nonprofit not only determines the class makeup of the organization but also connects its practices of reading to multicultural, neoliberal methods of governance. These strategies of governance rely on the exploitation of community alliance: neoliberalism, as Nikolas Rose explains, “govern[s] through the regulated and accountable choices of autonomous agents—citizens, consumers, parents, employees, managers, investors—and […] through intensifying and acting upon their allegiance to particular ‘communities,’ such as ethnic and racialized communities (61). The NetSAP book club offers a perfect example of how neoliberal multicultural agendas can impact community formations without completely defining them.

These associations with a federally recognized nonprofit are not overtly or self-consciously at work in the discussions of literature by book club participants, who are not required to be official members of NetSAP itself in order to join the club. Even so, the association with an official nonprofit affects the book club’s procedures and public image in two ways. First, it affects practices of reading in the group by encouraging a constant influx of new members. In contrast to more traditional book clubs in which membership tends to be stable (very often consisting of friends), each NetSAP book club meeting is publicized to the entire membership of the local nonprofit chapter via social media and the Yahoo Listserv. Even though the NetSAP book club does tend to attract a set of regular attendees that cycle through over the years, anyone interested in the book under discussion can participate, not only in a book club meeting but also in selecting new literature for the book club to read in upcoming months. In this way, the book club’s association with a nonprofit promotes open participation, democratizes the activity of selection, and shapes the community-based canon that NetSAP book club members build and publicize online. Second, the affiliation between NetSAP the nonprofit and NetSAP the book club endorses the latter via the patina of authority that accompanies nonprofit status.

The literature in the book club, as I outline in the introduction, is selected by current participants and chosen by polling them about their preferences. The book club leader is responsible for collating all nominations and distributing them for members to vote on—the top twelve choices make up the reading list for the year. Between 1998 and 2014, the group read 176 works of fiction and nonfiction dealing in South Asian themes by authors who are almost exclusively of South Asian descent but who...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Mad for Difference: Authenticity, Ambivalence, and the Cosmopolitan South Asian American Reader
• 1 The Glue That Keeps Us Together: Constructing Ethnic Community in the NetSAP Book Club
• 2 There’s a Whole Other Class: Model Minorities, Privileged Subjects, and the Question of Caste
• 3 A Narrow View of the World: Gendered Literary Culture and South Asian American Belonging
• 4 Thinking and Feeling with Her: Representation and Affect in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
• Afterword. Beyond Ambivalence?
• Appendix 1. List of Interviewees
• Appendix 2. Book Club Meetings Attended (2006–2007, 2009–2010)
• Appendix 3. Complete List of Books Read by the NetSAP DC Book Club, 1998–2014
• Appendix 4. Interview Questions for NetSAP Book Club Interviewees
• Notes
• References
• Index