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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.

This book situates immigration laws within a larger context by focusing on the global migration of South Asians using frameworks of empire and global power. It features chapters that look into the South Asian diaspora and how it has been shaped by political movements, globalization, neoliberalism, and imperialism. These chapters challenge the dominant assumptions in the field of South Asian American studies while also addressing the contemporary political and economic conjuncture and the places of South Asian migration within it. The book also examines how South Asian migrants to the United States have joined the ranks of working-class recent immigrants of color who are asked to perform affective labor for the urban elite.

This chapter examines the trope of travel — both literal and metaphorical — within the new Bollywood film as well as cinematic travels to South Asian diasporic spaces. It focuses on Yash Raj films, particularly Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ, 1995), which triggered Bollywood's travels overseas, and how it became the template for the new ‘travelling’ films. It is shown that the global journey in Yash Raj films appears to anticipate the history of cultural and economic globalization in India, and concludes that DDLJ has evolved into an allegory of Indian modernities.

This chapter explores the role of the home and the household as structuring forces in the lives of domestic workers and how they are entwined with the issue of gender in contemporary theorizations of South Asian diaspora. As physical spaces of labor, the home and household were sites of economic relations to be brought under labor regulations. As targets of political struggle, they were spaces to be transformed. Both understandings recognized the ideological constitution of home and household as central to shaping quotidian diasporic life embedded in dominant notions of the private and the public. Using data gathered at Worker's Awaaz and the legal case of one of its domestic worker members, this chapter considers the mechanisms of entry and placement through which South Asian migrants become part of a diasporic formation. It also examines the implicit gendering of diaspora as male through attention to movement and rupture associated with men.

This chapter discusses the South Asian experience within the Gulf, as well as the politics of inclusion and exclusion that deny the expatriates within the scope of a modern Emirati identity. The South Asian diaspora had arrived in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) during the country’s oil boom, as their labor had made up for the lack of manpower in the state. However, in more recent times there came a desire for the elite class to establish themselves as the legitimate ruling class, and their efforts in doing so have alienated the South Asian identity from a chance at citizenship within a neoliberal regime. There is, however, a deeper undercurrent of fear that causes the divide and the complacency thereof between Emiratis and immigrants alike—that the promises of capitalism may fail them one day.

This book has explored the family narratives of Asian diasporic subjects that explain particular histories by juxtaposing public events with private experiences, thus revealing the ways in which ethnic identity is constructed (or reconstructed) within the experience of diaspora. By having access to these stories, readers are able to understand the development of particular ethnic communities, as the narratives support the production of a history and culture for the community. Writers of family memoirs deliberately promote their texts as community artifacts in the context of developing ethnic discourse. The book has also highlighted the motivations that inspire subjects of the Asian diaspora to write about their families, particularly the desire to contribute to collective memory. In this final chapter, the author reflects on the transnationalism and transculturalism of the family by narrating how the Philippines became the place where people from different countries became her family.

This book has chronicled the international lives of South Asian migrants in the United States. It has examined these migrants' journeys, across the Pacific Rim and the Indian and Atlantic Oceans into New York and New Orleans, and how their visions of life and liberty expanded along with their travels. It has also highlighted American imperialism and its impact on people in dire need of migration, people like Julio Jubala and Kumari Lakshmi Devi but also earlier intellectuals such as the radical journalist Kumar Goshal. Writing in the Pittsburgh Courier and in the National Guardian, Goshal offered an anti-imperialist account of India's struggle for freedom and of America's self-imposed obligations for empire. This Afterword also reflects on personal experience as a professor of an undergraduate course on the South Asian diaspora at Cornell University.

Approaching the 1895 edition of the Bengali Kasasol Ambia that remains in a Broken Hill mosque as a history book, this chapter examines the historical storytelling techniques that this Sufi text employs. I argue that this particular non-modern history book was underpinned by a relationship between humans and knowledge – an epistemology - quite distinct to colonial modern methods of truth production. The chapter makes a methodological argument for animating and reinvigorating non-modern strategies for producing truths about the past and claims continuity to non-modern historiographical traditions.