Ethnic performance, language proficiency, and ethnic media use among Indian American immigrants

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on how and why Indian American immigrants engage with movies from their home country in a transnational global context. Existing literature has focused on lack of host language proficiency as the primary reason for ethnic media consumption. We suggest that for Indian Americans, the motivation for consuming Indian films is driven by ethnic performance rather than language proficiency. A survey was conducted with Indian Americans to explore the relationships among Indian movie consumption, acculturation indices, language proficiency, and ethnic performance. Results show that ethnic performance is a stronger predictor of Indian movie consumption than language proficiency and acculturation indices.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• South Asia
• ethnic media
• movies
• immigrants

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the organizations and participants for their support for this study. They are grateful for the feedback provided by Rick Street, Mike Stephenson, Muniba Saleem, and Alex Sousa on earlier drafts of the paper.

Notes

1. Some scholars have problematized the home/host country dichotomy because it does not take into account the experiences of immigrants of various generations, some of whom may never visit their “home” country and feel more at home in the “host” country (Abdelhady, 2008). Similarly, some people might be geographically located at “home” but encouraged to become culturally disembedded from “home” culture despite never physically moving to a “host” country (Rowe, Malhotra, & Pérez, 2013). Complex networks of globalization and immigration trajectories problematize the home/host country dichotomy. Although we use these terms in this paper, we caution readers against assuming that the terms “home” and “host” country have universal meanings for immigrants.

2. “Indian movies” is a broad term that includes more than media in Hindi. Although ethnic media are also often used to refer to media that are in a community’s native language (Tufte & Riis, 2001), because Indian Americans are often fluent in multiple Indian languages, for this community, defining ethnic media solely in terms of native language is limiting. To account for this breadth, our survey asked respondents about “Indian movies (movies produced in India)” so that responses might not be limited to only Hindi-language media. Thus, the Indian movies respondents said they watched could potentially be of various languages. Respondents subscribed to various channels that broadcast in various Indian languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, and Bengali; rented DVDs for Indian media; and watched Indian media through online channels. Therefore, exposure to Indian media could potentially involve exposure to movies in multiple Indian languages.