Making (Critical) Meaning of Meaning-making: Complicating the Racialization of Asian Indian American Youth

ABSTRACT

This article examines the racializing processes throughlining the meaning-making of a Guru Vandana—an annual teacher appreciation event organized by many Asian Indian communities across the U.S.—that took place in a Midwestern city in 2019. Guided by a framework of transmodalities (a novel lens for the analysis of multimodal semiosis) and critical bifocality (a methodological approach to connect discursive and lived practices with broader structural arrangements), the author drew on interview and observational data of a set of Indian American parents and children and white teachers who attended the event to trace and analyze meanings intended, made, and missed of featured performances (e.g., dance, chants, and yoga demonstrations by the children). Indexing the deep embedment of Indian American positioning within multiple translocal and transnational hierarchies, findings reveal Guru Vandana’s tacit operation as a space wherein varied framings and understandings of Indianness circulate to both contest and (re)produce racialization, stereotypes, and caste subjectivity.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Gordon B. West for his warm and constructive engagement with early drafts of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. By “racializing processes” I refer to the range of relational, interactional processes that work in tandem with structural conditions to produce and ascribe particular identities to social groups (or processes inherent in racialization, following Omi & Winant, 1994). I employ this term (rather than “racialization”) to especially index the nascent and incomplete state of what is (coming to be) known of Indian Americans’ experiences of race, racism, and subjectivity.

2. The names of all places, individuals, and organizations in this article are pseudonyms.

3. I share the self-identified castes and genders of Indian participants alongside their names in this article. My reason for the inclusion of the former is their salience to the analysis; and although I do not take up the latter as an interpretive axis, they may be of interest to scholars who might like to consider the potential genderedness of some participants’ meaning-making.

4. Traditionally mercantile, moneylending caste.

5. Traditionally mercantile, landlord caste.

6. Traditionally mercantile, warrior caste.

7. Traditionally landowning, agricultural caste.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nikhil M. Tiwari

Nikhil M. Tiwari is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with interests in the languaging, literacies, and racialization of Indian American youth.