Notes
- This essay took shape from talks I gave in early 1999 at Wesleyan University and the University of California, Irvine. Many thanks to the various interlocutors in those venues whose questions or comments greatly improved the argumentation herein.
- Celia W. Dugger, “India Offers Rights to Attract Its Offspring's Cash,” The New York Times, April 4, 1999, 12; P. Jayaram, “Government Launches PIO Card to Attract Diaspora,” India Abroad, April 9, 1999, 4.
- Ibid.
- And here I do not mean to suggest that the “global economy” is a new phenomenon; as many have elaborated, the very history of capitalism is international from its outset. But it does make some sense to see recent developments, of investment and “flexibility” as distinctive, much as David Harvey has outlined for the period he calls “late capitalism.” (The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Essays in Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (London: The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1991) also engage this issue in ways that I have found useful.
- Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York: New York Academy, 1992). I use the term “transnationalism” with obvious reference to the wonderful work of these authors, but extend it to cover imaginaries that lie beyond more material social practices.
- Sherry Ortner has observed that understanding second-generation middle-class (this is media-influenced) cultures requires similar reorder-ings of what we take to be “the field,” in “Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World,” Cultural Anthropology 13: 3 (1998), 414–440.
- The point of reference for such historiographical and social scientific trends is European immigration. David Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989) and Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985) are two fine examples of this scholarship.
- Though this may in fact have been overstated by meta-histories of these histories; there may be a way in which more social scientific analyses of assimilation (for example, in the Chicago School's work of the 1940s), or public policy accounts, have foregrounded assimilation and the loss of homeland cultures in ways that have not been borne out, even, by the experiences of white ethnic Americans. Robert Orsi's book, for example, never uses terms such as “transnational” or “diaspora,” but nonetheless provides more nuanced readings of Italian American culture than any assimilationist explanation could offer.
- Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 203.
- Maxine Fisher discusses this in her The Indians of New York City (Columbia, Missouri: South Asia Books, 1980).
- The Bhagat Singh Thind Case in 1923, cited by a number of historians, including Joan Jensen, Passage from India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 256–259 and Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), 94, exemplifies the many debates surrounding the racial identity of Indians before United States laws of naturalization and citizenship in the pre-1965 period.
- Interview with Gopal Raju, New York, February 13, 1995.
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983), 37.
- “Indian Scientists in U.S. Discuss Ways to Help India Meet Her Needs,” India Abroad, November 15, 1974, 5.
- Ibid.
- See Pavan Sahgal, “India Gives Foreign Investors High Returns: Conditions are Misrepresented by Press Here,” India Abroad, December 6, 1974, 5.
- A second part of this argument is the political transnationalism in which Indian political parties maintain strong financial links to NRIs; the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for example, has developed a group called the Overseas Friends of the BJP, which has financed and publicized the rightist party in India and can even be seen to have contributed to its rise in India.
- Arthur W. Helweg and Usha M. Helweg, An Immigrant Success Story: East Indians in America (London: Hurst & Company, 1990) details some of these developments.
- Interview with Subhas Ghai, New York, July 14, 1995.
- Yet, interestingly enough, merchants from a wide variety of national backgrounds, have supported the formal designation of this area as a “Little India” for commercial purposes. For more on this debate, and its repercussions, see Sandhya Shukla, “India Abroad: Transnational Ethnic Cultures in the United States and Britain, 1947–1997,” Ph.D. dissertation, chapter two, 1998.
- “Bazaar with the Feel of Bombay, Right in Queens,” New York Times, January 4, 1993, B1; “India Casts its Subtle Spell in Queens,” New York Times, August 19, 1994, C1.
- This insight is based on a number of informal interviews that I have conducted with neighborhood residents.
- Scott Harris, “‘Little India,’” Los Angeles Times, September 1, 1992, B1; and “Little India in Artesia—Why Not?,” Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1992, M4.
- Harris, ‘“Little India,’” D12.
- Ibid.
- Almost all respondents in the research on Indian Americans that I have conducted cite the American Dream in their stories about themselves. This forms another argument about the simultaneous belief in America and attachment to India that I do not have space to engage here.
- Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 6.
- Indeed, the other pieces in this volume on progressive South Asian cultures wonderfully illustrate how those interventions take place.