Notes
- Michael Lind notes that the U.S. Census Bureau has predicted that in 2050 “whites will make up 52.7 percent of the U. S. population…Hispanics will account for 21.1 percent…; blacks, 15 percent, and Asians, 10.1 percent.” Lind's article makes the additional interesting observation that, based on demographic data from the Russell Sage Foundation, racial intermarriage—especially between Asian Americans and whites and between Hispanics and whites—will contribute to the dramatic “creolization of America,” “The Beige and the Black,” The New York Times Magazine (August 16,1998), 38–39.
- I use the term somewhat guardedly, keeping in mind Spivak's caveat that “Subject position is something that we in fact cannot ourselves declare. It is something that should keep us careful because a subject position is assigned, and the word there is ‘sign’; it is that which makes itself visible through our textual productions in language and action.” See Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudevan, “Transnationality and Multicultural Ideology: Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak” in Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality, Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudevan, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 64–89. What is of most value in her observation is that the individual is read as “text” by others who then position him/her in certain ways “historically? rhetorically? psychologically? politically?” (64).
- Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Varieties of Ethnic Politics and Ethnicity Discourse,” in The Politics of Difference: Ethnic Premises in a World of Power, Edwin N. Wilmsen and Patrick McAllister, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 25–44. Pieterse quotes Paul Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism (Sage Publications, 1991), 31.
- Gerd Baumann, “Dominant and Demotic Discourses of Culture: Their Relevance to Multiethnic Alliances,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Racism, Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood, eds. (London: Zed Books, 1997), 209–225.
- Naheed Islam, “Bengalis,” in American Immigrant Cultures: Builders of a Nation (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1997).
- Cornel West, “A Matter of Life and Death,” in The Identity in Question, John Rajchman, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 15–19.
- Homi Bhabha, “Halfway House,” Artforum (May 1997), 11–12, 125.
- Bhabha, 125.
- Dilip Singh Saund, Congressman from India (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1960), 82
- Conversation with Uppuluri in August 1998.
- In this connection, see Ali Behdad, “Nationalism and Immigration to the United States,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 6: 2 (1997), 155–178. His observation on immigration offers an interesting parallel: “The perpetual crisis of immigration re-inscribes a notion of difference on the national community and its others, a difference that must be constantly maintained to propagate a space of contestation where concepts of nationality as citizenship and state as sovereignty can be re-articulated and re-affirmed. The crisis of immigration, in other words, awakens the community to self-consciousness as a nation” (164–165).
- Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 41.
- On September 21, 1998, Rishi Maharaj, an Indo-Trinidadian, was savagely beaten with baseball bats by three white youths in South Ozone Park, Queens. On the May 13, 1998 taxi workers' strike, see Vijay Prashad's article “The Day New York Stood Still,” Color Lines 1: 2 (Fall 1998), 35–37. Nearly 50 percent of New York City's cab drivers are South Asian. The strike is also noteworthy because it offers a critical reminder of the possibility of pan-South Asian coalitions despite national hostilities: “Opposition to Giuliani's rules created immediate solidarity among drivers, which held even as Lidia and Pakistan locked into an escalating nuclear arms race that threatened to inflame nationalist passions. ‘The Pakistani and Indian drivers didn't blink. They kept going on not for a moment allowing nationalisms to interfere with the organizing/NYTWA (New York Taxi Workers Alliance) organizer Biju Mathew reports” (Prashad, 36–37).
- Essentialism is the condition of attributing racial and sociocultural differences among people to biology, of declaring these differences to be fixed and unchanging and using them to justify unequal treatments of people. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), 205.
- See Jeffrey Gerson, “Cambodian Poltical Succession in Lowell, Massachusetts,” New England Journal of Public Policy 13: 2 (Spring/Summer 1998), 103–104.
- See Leti Volpp, “Mapping Asian Pacific America,” Remarks at the Sixteenth Annual Asian American Studies Conference (1999); she points out the way in which African Americans are hyper-nationalized and Asian Americans are seen as perpetual foreigners.
- Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 9.
- See Joan Scott, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity,” in The Identity in Question, John Rajchman, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3–12.
- Rajini Srikanth, “Ram Yoshino Uppuluri's Campaign: The Implications for Panethnicity in Asian America,” in A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America, Lavina Shankar and Rajini Srikanth, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 203.
- Tom Seigenthaler was campaign adviser during Vice President Al Gore's 1988 run for the presidency; Jim Cooper was then Democratic Senator from Tennessee; Gene Caldwell was the Democratic nominee for state senator in 1986; he managed two successful campaigns for Marilyn Llyod, the congresswoman whose vacated seat Uppuluri was seeking.
- Nikos Papastergiadis, “Tracing Hybridity in Theory,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity, 264.
- Srikanth, 206–209.
- Peter Van der Veer, “‘The Enigma of Arrival’: Hybridity and Authenticity in the Global Space,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity, 95.
- The 1998 India Day celebrations in Boston serve as a good example of the reinforcement of a tradition that is seen as static, hallowed in the past, and not subject to interpretive changes.
- See Arthur Pais, “India Chairs: Sponsored Programmes,” India Today (North American Special), August 17, 1998.
- Shamita Das Dasgupta and her daughter Sayantani Dasgupta note that women are expected to become the preservers and transmitters of these “pure” values of a “mythical culture that denies all variability. To be considered an authentic Indian in the Indian community, an individual has to unquestioningly accept an upper class, heterosexist, Hindu-centric, hierarchical, and sanitized version of ‘Indian culture’” (192). See also Shani Mootoo's effective story “Out on Main Street” for the rigid definitions of authentic Indian that prevail in the diaspora; definitions that exclude homosexuality and creolized Caribbean Indians. The film Miss India Georgia explores the performance of Indian identity by four young Indian women from Georgia who take part in a beauty pageant; particularly poignant is its depiction of a Caribbean Indian who yearns to be accepted into the Indian community as being genuinely Indian and hopes for a victory in the pageant to be recognized as a bona fide member. See Shamita Das Dasgupta and Sayantani Dasgupta, “Bringing Up Baby: Raising a ‘Third World’ Daughter in the ‘First World,’” in Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire, Sonia Shah, ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1997), 182–199. Also, Shani Mootoo, “Out on Main Street,” in Out on Main Street and Other Stories (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1993), 45–57. The film Miss India Georgia was produced and directed by Sharon Grimberg and Daniel Friedman and released in 1997.
- For example, of the fifteen items on the program for the 1998 Boston India Day celebrations, only one drew upon any tradition that is predominantly Muslim or associated as Muslim, and even this Qawwali was performed by Hindu singers. I am not advocating that in-group membership confers expertise, but I make the point only because among the listed performers on the program less than 5 percent were Muslim or Christian and among the organizers of the celebrations no Muslim or Christian names appeared, an absence that underscores the Hinduizing of the Indian diaspora in the United States.
- Aziz Haniffa, “Grassroots Campaign Helps Chaudhary Romp Home,” India Abroad (November 13, 1998), 26.
- Alastair Bonnett, “Constructions of Whiteness in European and American Anti-Racism,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity, 187. See Howard Winant, “Gayatri Spivak on the Politics of the Subaltern: Interview by Howard Winant,” Socialist Review 20: 3 (July-September 1990), 93. See also Judith Butler who offers a similar view: “It is imperative to assert identities, at the same time that it is crucial to interrogate the exclusionary operations by which they are constituted. So what I'm calling for is not the surpassing of particularity, but rather a double movement: the insistence on identity and the subjection of identity-terms to a contestation in which the exclusionary procedures by which those identity-terms are produced are called into question” in John Rajchman, ed., The Identity in Question (New York: Routledge, 1995), 129.
- Some of Uppuluri's endorsements include: The KnoxOille News-Sentinel, East Tennessee's largest newspaper; The Oak Ridger, Oak Ridge's daily newspaper; Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, International Local 3–288; International Guards Union of America, Local #3; Atomic Trades and Labor Council, AFL-CIO; United Plant Guard Workers of America, Local 109; Knoxville Building and Construction Trades Council; International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, Local 2709; the African American Voters Coalition of Chattanooga. Most remarkable was the statement by Danny Maples, President of the Knoxville Building and Trades Council, the area's largest trade union: “The council does not usually endorse a non-incumbent candidate in a primary…. We usually wait until the general election to endorse a candidate. Ram's experience with issues specific to the Third District and the Oak Ridge facilities and commitment to job creation made quite an impact on our members” (Paul Sloca, “Uppuluri Endorsed by Area's Largest Labor Union,” The Oak Ridger July 28, 1994), 5A.
- I interviewed Baiju Shah in March, 1995 at Somerville, Massachusetts.
- Phone interview of Kumar Barve on August 24, 1998.
- E-mail correspondence with Barve, November 16, 1998.
- Paul Sloca, “3rd District Candidate's Fund Raising Activities Queried by Opponents,” The Oak Ridger (June 6, 1994), 8A.
- Ibid.
- Narayan Keshavan, “Ram Uppuluri Sets America First,” India Abroad (February 25, 1994), 14.
- Ela Dutt, “All Out Campaign Needed” India Abroad (April 1, 1994), 8.
- Aziz Haniffa, “2 Indian Americans Won at State Level, Many Others Lost,” India Abroad (November 13, 1998), 24.