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Abstract
How does intermarriage affect a storyteller? In this essay, I seek to examine literary narratives of South Asian family formation that take late twentieth-century intermarriages—particularly between Indian men and white American women—as their central governing trope. This phenomenon raises two linked questions: first, how do South Asian families recruit or reject individuals within constructs of South Asian identity; and second, to what extent do individuals not of South Asian descent gain the authority to imagine and re-imagine the contours of their multiracial family? I here examine the work of the white American writer Robbie Clipper Sethi, whose novel-in-stories, The Bride Wore Red (1996), tells the unfolding saga of a multiracial South Asian family in the United States and India. These narratives of white women socialised into ambivalent places within larger South Asian families, I argue, figure larger anxieties about imaginative representation across the mobile borders of what is considered one's culture. The family structure emerges as a contradictory space that empowers this border-crossing representational authority by simultaneously calling this authority into question.
Notes
1 A note on terms. Throughout this essay, I use, with some hesitation, the languages of race and ethnicity. My understanding of ‘race’ draws upon Omi and Winant's classic definition of it as ‘a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies’ (italics in the original), while my use of ethnicity signals an interest in dimensions of cultural practice. The history of racialisation of Indians in America has been a complex and contradictory one: Asian Indians have, legally and informally, been both evicted from and conscripted into categories of whiteness at different points in their history, while they have also been ambivalently located within the pan-ethnic racial category of Asian America. To acknowledge these legacies, in which socially perceived differences have sometimes been seen as racial, at other times as ethnic, I invoke both concepts. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 2nd ed. 1994), p.55.
2 Jennifer Ann Ho, ‘The Place of Transgressive Texts in Asian American Epistemology’, in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Vol.56, no. 1 (Spring 2010), p.210.
3 Sheng-mei Ma, The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
4 Colleen Lye, ‘Racial Form’, in Representations, No.104 (Fall 2008), p.96.
5 Timothy Yu, personal correspondence with author, 10 July 2011.
6 See, for example, ‘Indian Ties: East Marries West’ [www.indianties.blogspot.com]; ‘My Chinese Wife’ [interacialmarriage.blogspot.com]; ‘I Married An Alien’ [www.imarriedanalien.co]; ‘On My Mind’ [foreverloyal.wordpress.com]; ‘My Sky—Multiracial Family Life’ [multiracialsky.wordpress.com]; ‘My American Meltingpot’ [myamericanmeltingpot.blogspot.com]; and ‘Honeysmoke’ [www.honeysmoke.com].
7 ‘Indian Ties: East Marries West’ (17 June 2011) [www.indianties.blogspot.com, accessed 19 July 2011].
8 See, for example, Karen Isaksen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
9 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (trans. Charles Lam Markmann) (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p.63.
10 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, ‘Introduction: Myself in India’, in How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), p.9.
11 Madhur Jaffrey, World Vegetarian (New York: Clarkson Potter Publishers, 1999), p.viii.
12 For a more extended discussion of Jaffrey's approach to cosmopolitanism, see Shameem Black, ‘Recipes for Cosmopolitanism: Cooking Across Borders in the South Asian Diaspora’, in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol.31, no.1 (2010), pp.1–30.
13 Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.170.
14 Sean-Shong Hwang, Rogelio Saenz and Benigno E. Aguirre, ‘Structural and Assimilationist Explanations of Asian American Intermarriage’, in Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol.59, no.3 (August 1997) p.758.
15 Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), p.60.
16 Ibid., p.286.
17 Jeffrey S. Passel, Wendy Wang and Paul Taylor, ‘Marrying Out’, Pew Research Center (4 June 2010) [www.pewresearch.org/pubs/1616/american-marriage-interracial-interethnic, accessed 21 July 2011].
18 Sharon M. Lee and Marilyn Fernandez, ‘Trends in Asian American Racial/Ethnic Intermarriage: A Comparison of 1980 and 1990 Census Data’, in Sociological Perspectives, Vol.41, no.2 (1998), p.328. Lee and Fernandez measured 1,125 exogamus Indian marriages in 1980 and 20,846 in 1990.
19 Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.2.
23 Susan Koshy, Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p.132.
20 Hwang, Saenz, and Aguirre, ‘Structural and Assimilationist Explanations’, pp.765, 766.
21 Ibid., p.766.
22 Lee and Fernandez, ‘Trends in Asian American Racial/Ethnic Intermarriage’, p.337.
24 Ho, ‘The Place of Transgressive Texts’, p.218.
25 I theorise these elements in more depth in Shameem Black, Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp.35–45.
26 Robbie Clipper Sethi, The Bride Wore Red (New York: Picador USA, 1996), p.9. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
27 Vincent J. Cheng, Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), pp.143–8.