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Reel to Real: Desi Teens' Linguistic Engagements with Bollywood

Shalini Shankar

in Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America

This chapter identifies “Bollywood” films—feature‐length movies produced in Bombay (Mumbai), India—as a source of linguistic and cultural production in the South Asian diaspora. South Asian Americans ... More

This chapter identifies “Bollywood” films—feature‐length movies produced in Bombay (Mumbai), India—as a source of linguistic and cultural production in the South Asian diaspora. South Asian Americans (Desis), especially youth, engage with these Hindi language films with English subtitles on a number of levels. The chapter focuses on the circulation and consumption of Bollywood films in two locations in the South Asian diaspora: Silicon Valley, CA and Queens, NY. Ethnographic and sociolinguistic data of conversational exchanges, commentary during viewing, and personal narratives are presented to illustrate Bollywood's role in shaping linguistic processes of indexicality, bivalency, and identity. In these ways, the chapter analyzes how media and language use together shape style and identity in this Asian American community, as well as how this process varies between different locations of the South Asian diaspora.Less

Racial Ambiguity: Hoopin’ in Other Ethnic Leagues

Stanley I. Thangaraj

in Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity

South Asian American identity is not formed against the dominant white normative masculinity alone. This chapter looks at how the racialization of South Asian Americans as “nerds” also leads to a ... More

South Asian American identity is not formed against the dominant white normative masculinity alone. This chapter looks at how the racialization of South Asian Americans as “nerds” also leads to a passing into various racial and ethnic categories. This passing is a gendered phenomenon based on a certain racial ambiguity that poses South Asian American men, like African American men, as innately athletic and dangerous to the nation and sport. South Asian Americans play in the Asian American and Latino basketball leagues while pushing the boundaries of both categories even as they are excluded from the realm of hero-making; African American men are not allowed in as frequently and they face tremendous policing. This chapter highlights the ways in which race, blackness, and masculinity are shaped through South Asian American racial ambiguity.Less

Introduction The Post-Identity Condition

in The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature

This book explores Asian American culture and politics by focusing on the notion of identity. It considers how the critique of identity politics has reconfigured the parameters of Asian American ... More

This book explores Asian American culture and politics by focusing on the notion of identity. It considers how the critique of identity politics has reconfigured the parameters of Asian American Studies and traces the persistence of what it calls the “idealized critical subject,” a theoretical figure that operates throughout Asian American literary culture and cultural criticism. To understand the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation, the book analyzes texts from different moments in the history of Asian American literature, including those by Eileen Chang, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje, and Jose Garcia Villa. It looks at the referential limits of Asian America while remaining cognizant of its so-called “real-life referents.” The book also examines Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness, which illustrates how the relationship between knowledge and subjectivity can be theorized through an idealized critical subject.Less

“Who Is Desi?”: Understanding Organized Brown Out Basketball

Stanley I. Thangaraj

in Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity

Where chapter 1 showed multi-ethnic spaces where ethnic and religious difference were not critical to team formation, chapter 2 looks at Indo-Pak Basketball tournaments, especially in Chicago, that ... More

Where chapter 1 showed multi-ethnic spaces where ethnic and religious difference were not critical to team formation, chapter 2 looks at Indo-Pak Basketball tournaments, especially in Chicago, that offer a way to disrupt the uniformity of South Asian American sporting masculinity through ethnicity, religion, and class. Though the young men affirm a sameness as South Asian Americans through shared racializations, they affirm difference through their religious, ethnic, and class backgrounds. In the process, they also set up difference from each other through particular athletic feats.Less

Finding Home in Gaysian America: Constructing Gay Asian Male Identities

C. Winter Han

in Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America

This chapter discusses the ways in which gay Asian American men construct social identities within the larger confines of race and sexuality, paying attention to how they construct these identities ... More

This chapter discusses the ways in which gay Asian American men construct social identities within the larger confines of race and sexuality, paying attention to how they construct these identities through the stories they tell about what it means to be both gay and Asian. It argues that identities are actively negotiated and maintained through interaction with others and the larger social environment, and that gay Asian male identity is a response to the racialized and sexualized situation that those who come to view themselves as gay Asian American men experience in the United States. Constructing a gay Asian male identity also defines how being gay and Asian makes one different from “regular” gays and Asians. The chapter explores the social and historical experiences of “difference” that begin to define them as a group not quite a part of “Asian America” or “gay America.”Less

Introduction

Stanley I. Thangaraj

in Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity

The introduction discusses the ways in which racialization is a gendered experience in theoretical terms. An examination of basketball cultures in South Asian America showcases the ways in which ... More

The introduction discusses the ways in which racialization is a gendered experience in theoretical terms. An examination of basketball cultures in South Asian America showcases the ways in which racializations and the responses to racializations involve masculinity while connecting sport in a myriad of ways to the nation and diaspora. The introduction interrogates the conceptions of “manning up” and “browning out” while providing an outline of the book.Less

Homework Becomes You: The Model Minority and Its Doubles

Ju Yon Kim

in The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday

This chapter explores the contradictory desires incited by the model minority stereotype by reading Justin Lin's 2002 film Better Luck Tomorrow alongside Lauren Yee's 2008 play Ching Chong Chinaman. ... More

This chapter explores the contradictory desires incited by the model minority stereotype by reading Justin Lin's 2002 film Better Luck Tomorrow alongside Lauren Yee's 2008 play Ching Chong Chinaman. Both Better Luck Tomorrow and Ching Chong Chinaman feature characters who attempt to expand their lives by doubling as their others or taking them on as surrogates. This chapter explains how the characters' efforts to play different types of Asian Americans are constrained by their own obligatory physical execution and unpredictable social impact. It suggests that Lin and Yee use the model minority stereotype as an occasion for dramatizing fissuress within Asian America that are provisionally crossed with the racial mundane as accomplice, but never completely bridged.Less

Everyday Play: The Formation of Desi Pickup Basketball

Stanley I. Thangaraj

in Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity

This chapter explores the social context and cartography of Atlanta through South Asian American pick-up basketball spaces. By situating the mosques in the racial landscape of the bible-belt, ... More

This chapter explores the social context and cartography of Atlanta through South Asian American pick-up basketball spaces. By situating the mosques in the racial landscape of the bible-belt, black-white U.S. South, the chapter explores how pick-up basketball presents an entrée into American-ness for young South Asian American men. Yet this entry into American-ness and ideas of meritocracy involves the exclusion of African American men and women from the sporting court. Furthermore, the chapter examines how South Asian American men perform an athletic masculinity through various basketball moves while signifying their class, race, and relation to immigration waves.Less

Conclusion: Who Gets to Be Gay, Who Gets to Be Asian?

C. Winter Han

in Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America

This concluding chapter discusses how gay Asian American men are more interested in carving a social space that allows them to address both their gay and Asian American identities simultaneously ... More

This concluding chapter discusses how gay Asian American men are more interested in carving a social space that allows them to address both their gay and Asian American identities simultaneously rather than integrating themselves into the larger gay community. An example of this is how gay Asian American activists in Seattle deliberately choose to hold their events in Seattle's International District, the historic Asian American neighborhood. In this social space, they are able to reexamine taken-for-granted assumptions about who is Asian American, who is gay, and who gets to claim a physical and social space as their own. Also, doing so provides an opportunity for gay Asian American men to deeply embed themselves in Asian America and gay America.Less

Telling Times in (Asian) America: Extraordinary Poetics, Everyday Politics, and Endless Paradoxes

Tat-siong Benny Liew

in What Is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics? Reading the New Testament

This chapter aims to investigate how the interjections and interruptions from ancient apocalyptic traditions interact with the present of an “intrusive” and alien-ated (Asian) America, focusing ... More

This chapter aims to investigate how the interjections and interruptions from ancient apocalyptic traditions interact with the present of an “intrusive” and alien-ated (Asian) America, focusing primarily on the apocalyptic tradition that grows out of the book of Revelation in the New Testament. The chapter takes this approach for two reasons. First, it dismisses the notion that an origin—in this case, the book of Revelation—had an essence that, once identified, could dictate everything that comes afterward. The second reason concerns the issue of what is considered to be “appropriate” or “inappropriate” subject matter in the field of biblical studies. In this way, the chapter extends the scope of the biblical studies field to include the function of biblical texts in the wider world of literature and culture.Less

Shift of Scene: Re-viewing Anime Wong

A. Robert Lee

in Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory

This essay gives account of Yamashita’s selected performance scripts gathered in Anime Wong and their bearing upon Asian American life. It gives due recognition to the role of fantasy, dada-ism, ... More

This essay gives account of Yamashita’s selected performance scripts gathered in Anime Wong and their bearing upon Asian American life. It gives due recognition to the role of fantasy, dada-ism, role-play. There is also emphasis upon the stagecraft involved, the pantomimic and kabuki sets, and the interactive use of dialogue, mask, costume, video, music and tableau.Less

Sound and the Subject in The Woman Warrior and Tripmaster Monkey

in The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature

In her 1976 book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston appears to assert the incoherence of Chinese American identity. Kingston occupies a place in the history ... More

In her 1976 book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston appears to assert the incoherence of Chinese American identity. Kingston occupies a place in the history of Asian American literature as a native informant of sorts despite consistently undermining assumptions about cultural authenticity. She has won admiration by discarding the restrictive identity politics of cultural nationalism in favor of an anti-racist politics that guards against the dangers of essentialism. Writing about Asian America, Kingston invites us not only to read, but also to listen. This chapter examines works by Kingston and how she deploys music and sound tropes to imagine forms of community free from the debilitating limits of identity politics. It also argues that Kingston differs from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe with respect to treatment of rhythm because she remains deeply committed to a humanist politics through pacifism.Less

Que(e)rying the American Dream in Films of the Early Twenty-First Century

Eleanor Ty

in Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority

This chapter looks at a selection of post-2000 Asian American films that feature Asian American protagonists who are 1.5 or second-generation immigrants. The Debut (dir. Gene Cajayon), Red Doors ... More

This chapter looks at a selection of post-2000 Asian American films that feature Asian American protagonists who are 1.5 or second-generation immigrants. The Debut (dir. Gene Cajayon), Red Doors (dir. Georgia Lee), Saving Face (dir. Alice Wu), and Charlotte Sometimes (dir. Eric Byler) question the professional and financial ambitions that were hallmarks of the model minority ideal of the economically successful Asian American established in the 1960s. The films depict protagonists who find themselves unable to fulfill what Sara Ahmed calls the "happiness duty" and experience melancholia and depression. A number of these independent Asian American filmmakers explore non-heteronormative and non-conjugal ways of expressing love and passion, revealing the shifting values, transcultural affiliations and desires that are now part of the multiplicity of Asian North American identity.Less

The Impact of Religious Pluralism on American Women

R. Marie Griffith

in Gods in America: Religious Pluralism in the United States

The literature investigating the impact of religious pluralism on American women is scanty, and any projected conclusions are at this point partial and preliminary. The evidence does show that ... More

The literature investigating the impact of religious pluralism on American women is scanty, and any projected conclusions are at this point partial and preliminary. The evidence does show that encounters between women across religious boundaries have often resulted in profound disagreements that are explicitly grounded in gender norms and values, witness disputes between Catholic and Protestant women as well as between Muslim and Christian women over how each tradition treats them. American women have consistently used gender as a critical gauge for assessing religious traditions other than their own, as well as for articulating both the virtues and the vices of the religious communities to which they themselves belong. But if women's critiques of “other” religions have often rested on gendered grounds, so too have the models of cross-religious cooperation that appear in contemporary feminist accounts of women and pluralism.Less

On the Counterculture

Arthur Versluis

in American Gurus: From Transcendentalism to New Age Religion

Discusses 1960s religion, hippie religion, Asian religions in America; discusses the history of the counterculture and its religious significances.