“PERSONAL POETICS” OF THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN THE WEST
South Asian diaspora in the West traverses a transnational existence – their identities simultaneously connected to both the discourses of their home and host society. South Asian communities are made up of Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Nepalis, Sri Lankans, also arguably Afghanis too. These national categories can be broken into sub-communities based on languages, religions and the region/provinces of the country they hail from. The South Asian diaspora is spread across the globe – with major flows to the Anglophone West, which is Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. Despite socio-political disagreements in the Indian subcontinent, its diaspora often finds commonality in their shared sense of physical similarities, cultural processes, cuisine, languages and social structures. One of the biggest contributors in opting for “South Asian-ism” in the West over some sort of fixed national identities – are the common experiences of racism, cultural insensitivity and stereotyping.
These perceptions are often reflected in Western popular culture spearheaded by the film and mass-media products of the United States. South Asian identities are often relegated to a one-dimensional treatment – characters often performing “oriental/third-world” culture. This is the eccentricity of the “Indian” accent, curry-based cuisine, Bollywood singing & dancing; then there is the Slumdog Millionaire trope of abject poverty and extreme chaos, which has somehow become a major referential point for South Asian identities. Other problematics are based on career restrictivism— South Asians in popular culture are only imagined as taxi drivers, convenience store owners, engineers or doctors; these tropes are accentuated through constant emasculation of South Asian men – funny sidekicks who have miserable luck with the opposite sex; the rare depiction of South Asian womanhood, and if it's even explored, it's through a lack of “agency” – a generalized notion of South Asian patriarchal oppression or through their “exoticization” – a Eurocentric beauty norm – where women of colour’s beauty are conditional – hence, exotic to the standard Western norms.
These narratives are now being challenged through “cultural agencies” gained by a second-generation non-resident and cosmopolitan South Asian artists. Opposed to the older first-generation immigrants, they observably assimilate better in their Western host societies and forge strong cultural bonds. Growing up “brown” in the West or a very Anglo-centric cosmopolitan South Asian environment helps them traverse a transnational as well as a “hybrid” culture: negotiating a complex hyphenated South Asian-Western identities. These identities are significant in countering “inauthentic” South Asian representation in popular Western culture which invariably influences global perception. Breakout cultural voices in the form of Hasan Minhaj, Kumail Nanjiani, Priyanka Chopra, Mindy Kaling, Riz Ahmed and many others have now challenged these problematics by taking authorship of their own stories, of an “authentic” South Asian experience in the West – ranging from immigrant upbringings to the connotations attached with being “brown” in mainstream Caucasian societies. South Asians artists through their creative involvement in Western mainstream cultures are negotiating the meaning of being an Indian-American or British-Pakistani or Bangladeshi-Canadian and so on.
South Asian-ism is one’s “personal poetics,” finding solidarity in a unified pan-ethnic front that is more than cultural references of curry, Bollywood and other “third world” oriental stereotypes. Postcolonial and postmodern school of thoughts often see the transnational/intercultural/hybrid identities as part of “cultural hybridity” that can help enunciate a “third culture,” bringing two disparate cultures together: one of the East and one of the West. The intercultural involvement of minorities in a Western mediascape can help forgo its old Oriental self – a colonial construction of binaries “Us v/s Them.” Through meaningful cultural exchanges, one can examine new ways of knowing, seeing and perceiving – beyond stereotypes, perceptions, imaginations and generalizations.
Minorities given authorship of their own stories help in inclusive national discussions bordering on identity, race, gender, sexuality, cultures and nationalism. South Asian writers, comedians, filmmakers, musicians and artists through sufficient cultural nuances of ‘desh’ (motherland) and ‘videsh’ (hostland) can pin-point problematics in both their own diasporic as well as Western cultures. This unique cultural position makes many hybrid South Asian artists often speak truth to power – champion diasporic voices of the marginalized, both within & outside their diaspora – women, LGBTQ+, lower social classes etc. Through “art-based” inquiries – both in mainstream and independent media, propagated through a broader transnational network around the world can lead to an effective narrative — of racialized minorities. The poetics of private and the public self can merge into one, where being “brown” or belonging to another minority identity can be viewed through nuances rather any retrograde framework that have often created the categories of “the Other” – non-white & Western identities – with limited agencies interrupting the mainstream cultures from margins not – from “within.”
This article is originally published at Juice,
South Asian “personal poetics” imagined through various identity tags of cultures, ethnicities religions, and stereotypes.