Himanee Gupta-Carlson. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018. viii and 195 pp., bibliography, index. $27.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-252-08344-0).
Ever since Donald Trump launched his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, and especially after winning it, he has compelled us to articulate an understanding of what it means to be an American. As a brown-skinned naturalized citizen who talks with a pronounced accent, I have been struggling these past couple of years to point out that I, too, am an American. Of course, the struggle to claim one's American identity is not new; it is as old as the republic itself, and has been extensively explored in academic and popular writings. In such a context, Himanee Gupta-Carlson provides nuanced perspectives on what being an American means to those who immigrated from South Asia and—more important—to the children of these immigrants in Muncie, India(na): Middletown and Asian America.
For a long time, in the public imagination, Indian Americans were like the character Apu in The Simpsons. The public status of Indian Americans has changed significantly over the thirty years of Apu, however. Evidence of change can be found even within Trump's administration—the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, is the daughter of Indians who emigrated from India. In the corporate world, Indian Americans as chief executives (like Microsoft's Satya Nadella) are no longer breaking news. From stand-up comedy (like Aziz Ansari) to television journalists (like Fareed Zakaria) to Pulitzer-winning authors (like Jhumpa Lahiri,) Indian Americans are now everywhere one looks, and not merely at the caricatured convenience stores and motels. Professional athletics might just about be the only unconquered domain for Indian Americans!
Large-scale immigration from the Indian subcontinent became possible only after the enactment of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. It is no coincidence that this legislation followed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The United States ended the terribly discriminatory Immigration Act of 1917 that barred immigration from Asia. “The 1965 law made educational background, skills, and technical expertise the primary qualifiers for immigration and had an enormous influence on how young, educated, middle-class, and upper-middle-class adults in developing nations as India and Pakistan began to view their lifelong professional prospects” (p. 19).
Gupta-Carlson's parents came to the United States in 1961 for her father to pursue higher education, and the 1965 legislation made it easier for them to live and work in the United States. They moved to Muncie, Indiana, in 1966 and, as one can imagine, her parents were blazing a new trail. “Mushtaq affectionately refers to my father as the ‘Christopher Columbus’ for the Indians and other South Asians in Muncie” (p. 54). Naturally, there were a number of firsts, like her father becoming “the first Asian Indian professor at Ball State University to receive tenure as well as, in subsequent years, a promotion to full professor” (p. 52).
When we move far away from the place where we are born and raised, leave alone immigrating to another country, we have to establish a relationship to the new place and the people, and, therefore, we have to construct new identities. These place-making human interactions are difficult and complex, especially when one is distinctly foreign. Thus, to make oneself at home at one place—Muncie—is one thing, but to be considered as fellow Americans is another. Gupta-Carlson's parents and others were always foreign: “Foreignness differentiated them from the dominant white and considerably more subordinate African American cultures” (p. 79). Accents, food tastes, and other attributes certainly do mark most of us naturalized Americans as foreigners. “But what about their children who spent the better part of their youth and adolescent years growing up on American soil?” (p. 79). Even when the accents, food tastes, and other attributes are no different from the “typical American” attributes, it is not uncommon for Asian Americans to face this dreaded question: “But, where are you really from?” Gupta-Carlson writes that “the experience of being cast as a ‘foreigner’ or ‘outsider’ in the Midwest reflects not only how discourses on the United States are put forth to the world but also how immigrants learn to establish their own sense of place within that portrayal” (p. 15).
Gupta-Carlson's book adds to this much needed understanding of the “typical American.” It is, of course, an interesting coincidence that Muncie, Indiana, was her hometown and also the city that Lynd and Lynd chose for their Middletown studies. In 1924, the Lynds “chose a city without a large foreign-born population for their study of American culture” (p. 139). In the decades since that fateful decision, and thanks to the “media coverage and the market popularity of the book,” Muncie became “typical America, symbolically and literally” (p. 33). The original Middletown studies told a largely white American story, to which many nonwhite narratives like Gupta-Carslon's have been added to fine-tune an understanding of the typical American.
In exploring this “other” Muncie, Gupta-Carslon deftly employs autoethnography. Her book is an exemplar for any student who wants to use this research method. A portmanteau that combines autobiography and ethnography, autoethnography has been my preferred approach, for nearly two decades, to understanding and interpreting the world. As a scholarly approach, autoethnography allows “readers to ‘feel the truth’ of the stories that a narrator shares as well as those that her project informants have shared with her” (p. 13). In addition to her own experiences and reflections as an Indian American, Gupta-Carlson also effectively uses the stories of her parents, siblings, and longtime friends, and thirty-nine others who participated in interviews and discussion groups. Throughout all these, Gupta-Carslon weaves in the academic arguments, for which she provides extensive notes and bibliographic references in fifteen pages.
In autoethnography, like with any research method, the true data need to be presented, which Gupta-Carlson does with finesse, and she pulls no punches. She discusses, for instance, the subtle religious tensions that exist among the South Asians of Muncie. Hindus are the dominant majority in India and Nepal, whereas Pakistan and Bangladesh are overwhelmingly Islamic. Sri Lanka has a Buddhist majority population. In all these countries, religion has been an increasing presence in the public sphere. Over the past few years, Hinduism and Hindutva have been pushed to the front and center of India's politics. All these echo among the diaspora. Gupta-Carlson explores these subtleties in the lives of immigrants from South Asia, which will interest even those with only a superficial understanding of the subcontinent. She notes that in India's highly stratified social structure, one did not struggle to establish an identity, unlike the challenge of who is a typical American; as one of her interviewees said, “We all knew each other and what was expected. You understood your place and you stayed there” (p. 164).
Gupta-Carlson does not attempt to sugarcoat even her mother's anti-Muslim comment. When Gupta-Carlson questioned her mother about it, “Her reply was that her friendships and Hinduism were not related to the strife. You cannot understand, she told me. You are not Indian like me” (p. 158). Her mother sees herself as a Hindu and an Indian, in addition to having become a naturalized American back in 1974. That interaction between an Indian-born American citizen mother who is Hindu, and her U.S.-raised Indian American daughter who is not religious, speaks volumes about the search for identity in the United States.
Unlike many monographs from university presses, Muncie, India(na) is easy to read, understand, and appreciate. I suspect this is a result of Gupta-Carlson's background as a journalist before she returned to academe. Maybe graduate school curriculum in any discipline should include a couple of classes in journalism to make good writers out of future academics. This book could easily be stripped of academic discussions and rewritten as a collection of the personal narratives to reach a wider audience outside academe. I would not be surprised if such a publication soon appears. Muncie, India(na) is also a reminder to geographers that geographic thinking and analysis can happen outside the formal discipline of geography—Gupta-Carlson earned her doctorate in political science, and teaches humanities and arts at the Empire State College of the State University of New York.
At the end of it all, demographic changes and decreasing fertility rates mean that it is only a matter of time before the United States no longer has a majority group. If current trends continue, and there is no reason to expect otherwise, by 2045, non-Hispanic whites will account for less than 50 percent of the country's population. An increasing percentage will identify themselves as mixed race. In such an America, which is only a generation away, the definition of the “typical American” will have to come from a deep understanding of human geography. Himanee Gupta-Carlson's final sentence in Muncie, India(na): Middletown and Asian America will serve well as a conclusion to this review also: “The commitment to multiracial and multireligious pluralism needs to come from people representing all facets of American life, not just one's own” (p. 195).