Nervous Condition

TM  || they/she || Postcolonial baby in a complicated relationship with home and away

[nervous-condition]

Final reflection

This class has been one of the most important ones that I have taken at Oberlin. I really appreciated being able to engage with not only the narratives of the text, which were very wonderful reads, but also in thinking about the novel as the construction of a radical historiography. 

I am particularly excited about the Final project, because I have been thinking a lot about my own position in, and relationship to US-based identity politics, that I have a strong investment in, but have also experienced a lot of “first gen/second gen” conflicts. While I am not personally interested in engaging with politics of authenticity, or thinking of the recent immigrant as being depoliticized, I am interested in  examining how folks articulate, or don’t articulate, their feelings on these, based on their position. I am also interested in exploring objects and how shared experiences of a postcolonial identity develop in relationship to objects. 

One of my major obstacles in completely enjoying the course has been repeated attacks of anxiety in the weekly online journaling. I have tried to revisit this, and several times and understand what in the world it could be that I am unable to write a few paragraphs on my thoughts on the readings. Instead, in scrolling through the drafts folder on my Tumblr, I see pages and pages of writing, which never saw the light of day.  I can’t really seem to dismiss this as a senioritis thing, because it’s very particular to journaling for this class. A few days ago, I was talking to my mom and realized how hard it was for me to tell her what my project for this class was on, something that i had already completed and talked about so many times. That’s when I noticed that same circular motion of thinking, identifying one or two points but not being able to form  a linear narrative about it.  Is it just hard to talk about something that you are really, really invested in? Is there a source of shame and lack of belief in the worth of things that I am saying? Is this a disruption of enunciation produced by postcolonial trauma??!

[nervous-condition]

Exploring Postcolonial Identity: A Nascent Reading List

1. Ahmed, Aijaz. “The politics of literary postcoloniality.” Race and Class 36.3 (1992): 1–20.

In this article, Ahmed discusses the limitations of the term “postcolonialism”, by challenging some of its salient features.  Ahmed is skeptical of how notions of  “hybridity” and “contingency” are  central to identity formation for postcolonial scholars like Bhabha, and points out that this analysis lacks the lens of class. For Ahmed, the notion that one is able to reinvent one’s self and community as they move is only true in the case of surplus, and less privileged individuals are suffering from a case of postmodern “alienation” that Bhabha mistakes as hybridity. Ahmed challenges the binary of cultural differentiation and cultural hegemony, and staying true to his Marxist principles, invites the reader to think of the current global order as being marked by the advent of capitalist modernity.

2. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “Photography at the Heart of Darkness: Herbet Lang’s Congo Photographs (1909-15).” Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum.  

This is chapter is part of a larger book, where the author speaks on curation of objects imbibed with a colonial legacy. Mirzoeff focuses on a set of photographs of indigenous people of Congo taken by German Herbert Lang called African Reflections: Arts  of North-Eastern Zaire 1909-1915. The author uses these pictures to analyze how Congo is consrtucted,  not simply as the physical space that this occupies, but also the larger image that this connotes. The photographs are reflective of the ways that the imperial gaze creates a  of racialized other, and constructs a “cultural geography of space.”

3. Ahmed, S. 1999. Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement. International Journal of Cultural Studies 2:329–347

This article seeks to  complicate ideas of what “home” means by analyzing several different forms of writing by migrant and nomadic communities--short stories, theoretical essays, autobiographies, and reflections. In these writings, Ahmad notices a binary between home/away, where home is associated with a sense of belonging, familiarity, and comfort, so much so that the home becomes a fetish in the collective memory of migrants. The  “away” then is  the strange place that is brought about by the act of unhoming. The experience of leaving home in migration is thus always about the failure of memory to fully make sense of the place one comes to live,  which is experienced in the discomfort of inhabiting a migrant body, which is constantly out of place. Ahmad argues that it is this shared sense of estrangement from the home that leads to the development of migrant communities. 

4. Ahmad, A. 1987. Jameson's rhetoric of othemess and the "national allegory." Soc. Text 15:65-88

In this highly-cited paper, Ahmad critiques Fredric Jameson’s use of the terms “First world” and “Third World” literatures. While he sympathizes with Jameson’s argument that the Western canon of literature be diversified by introducing students to writings by authors from Africa, Asia and Latin America, he is critical of Jameson for setting up this First/Third world binary. This only conflates  the heterogeneous ways that countries of the Third World experience “colonialism and imperialism”, but in thinking the literature emerging out of these places as “national allegories”, Jameson does not leave room to have a more nuanced analysis of how race, class, gender, and other aspect of one’s identity shape their vantage point, and impact what they are writing. Thus, instead of establishing a First and Third World binary, that uses nation-states as units of analysis, Ahmad argues that the existence of feminist and black literature proves that  “there is right here, within the belly of the first world's global postmodernism, a veritable third world, perhaps two or three of them.”

5.Yusin, Jennifer (2009): The Silence of Partition: Borders, Trauma, and Partition History. Social Semiotics, 19:4, 453–468.

This article traces how the partition of India is considered a source of trauma in the subcontinent. The long legacies of divide-and-rule perpetuated by the British, as well as the sheer displacement of people, and rapes and murders that ensued as a result of the establishment of borders of India and Pakistan are an integral part of the collective memory of the people, and are to be reckoned with in thinking of a sense of collective identity. Yusin argues that “geographical borders drawn to separate and establish the independent nations of India and Pakistan are at once a concretely historical division and an incomprehensible site of trauma.”

[nervous-condition]

For my third recitation, I have decided to read a passage from Deleuze and Guattari’s “Rhizome” (page 8).  

This particular passage was important for me to understand the art of my friend Kalan, a fellow Oberlin alum. For the majority of our friendship, I have found it really difficult to access the language that he uses to speak about his art. While he’s spoken to me several times about the influence of Deleuze-Guattari, schizoanalysis and the rhizome on his choice to use puppetry as an art form, I  began to gain some understanding of his work when I read “Rhizome” (also the name for this art cart). 

The language in this article is extremely inaccessible, one of the frameworks from it that I found most useful was  the use of multiple entry and exit points in semiotics. As a puppetry enthusiast and Neuroscience major, I find the idea of dealing with networks more interesting than linear progression, when processing information. The purpose of this recitation was an attempt on my part to engage with it further by performing  the simultaneous acts of recitation and viewing of the video.

On related note, it’s interesting to me that Kalan chooses to perform in the streets and subways of NYC. I wonder to what extent I believe that he is translating the works of these philosophers for his audience. Is his work making the rhizomatic framework that Deleuze proposed more or less accessible to folks viewing this art? A conversation with the artists is soon to follow! 

The original video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fquU7xbOx_Q

[nervous-condition]

Margaret Cho Animation

Margaret Cho and Bruce Daniels discuss how hatred between Koreans and Black people needs to end.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp-5fa2jqGo

>>Response from a class “Globalization and Diaspora”. This article refers to a passage in Lily Cho’s article “The Turn to Diaspora” published in Topia Magazine in 2007. 

I have decided to write about the Cho article as we didn’t get to speak about that as much in class. I was very interested in the way the author approaches the term “diaspora”, emerging in relationship to power. For folks separated in time and space from the processes causing displacement, diaspora is a “mode of theorization which enables connections between traumas of colonialism even as it marks displacement” (Cho, 13). While the term diaspora provides vocabulary in understanding the sense of loss, often from a point of reference that is hard to name, it was enlightening to read Cho’s definition of diaspora as being a subjective experience, and unpacking the concept of diasporic consciousness. I feel like the discussion on diaspora is often focussed on the “vertical” aspect of the term, being understood through histories of displacement, but there is not as much discussion on how diasporas are constructed through “relations of difference with one another” (Hall, 229). Thus, the term “zionism” has different meanings when applied to Israeli and Africana people. While this term has been used by both diasporic communities, Jewish zionism  cannot be divorced from Israeli apartheid, and displacement and oppression of Palestinians. On the other hand, Black communities seek affirmation from the term: “a stolen Africa [is] sung as lost Zion in Jamaican rhythms on the sidewalks of Eastern Parkway” (Cho, 17). 

The lateral aspects of the subjectivity of diaspora are best understood through “genealogies of diaspora” that shed light on how diasporas are shaped by, and continue to shape, power structures in society. I looked up Margaret Cho and Bruce Daniel’s skit on Afro-Asian tensions, embodied by a Black man who walks into a Korean grocery store, and their mutual dislike of each other is taking away time and energy away from “hating white people” (Cho, 25). The skit helped me understand how the omnipresent Presence-Europeenne, and white supremacy, is invested in creating stereotypes of both of these subjects that place them in conflict with one another. What remains unsaid in Cho is the gender politics of this interaction: it is not coincidence that it is a Black man and a Korean woman (assumably, a non-native speaker of English). The hypersexualization of Black masculinity as “threatening” and the construction of Asian women as “passive/tame”  are also “suitable to the demands of capital” (Cho, 26). 

Moving forward, I wonder how diasporic individuals understand their identity as being constituted by this process of continuity and difference, and thus understand diasporic consciousness as being emergent and not simply using a specific event of displacement/migration as the chief reference point? Finally, I wonder how gender, sexuality, place of birth, class, among other aspects of identity simultaneously  inform, and are informed by, one’s idea of being a “diasporic” individual?

[nervous-condition]

Final Project: Abstract

Group members: Tania + Simba

The initial thoughts for the final project were inspired by two different pieces of work: a passage from Jose Muñoz’s “Cruising Utopias” and an exhibition in the Boston Museum of Fine arts called “Prácticas Globales: Permission To Be Global”. In the former, Muñoz talks about an art installation that he had seen that paired Warhol’s coke can, along with Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a coke with you”, which Muñoz reads as a quotidian act of consuming a simple object--a coke--around which forms ideas of queer relationally. The art installation complicated the idea of what it means to be a Latin American artist in a globalized age, and I remember being struck  by an exhibit that had images of Mickey and Minnie Mouse next to artwork related to Day of the Dead. It was interesting to me how    Latin American history and politics were central to each of the works, and simple objects like crushed coke cans  (where I had the moment of connecting these two ideas!) alongside traditional tools of immigration, were meant to comment on the advent of neoliberalism, and the expansion of markets and how that is connected to traditions and practices that have  been at the center of Latinx identity. 

For the project, I am interested in understanding how processes of decolonization, nation building and identity formation in Africa and South Asia have followed similar and/or different trajectories. The regions of the world hold special meaning for us as places we have grown up in, and also have acquired new vocabulary to reckon with, as we came to school in America. We hope to identify objects, rituals, behaviors  can be understood within histories, as well as the present, of (neo)colonial control, flow of labor and international aid, development of a strong middle class. We have thought of using works of literature (and some of the texts from class) as the central focus around which to frame these discussions. At this stage in my research, there are certain thoughts that I am interested in prioritizing: 1. Identifying these objects/behaviors to understand postcolonial, global desi/Southern African identity 2.understanding commonalities and difference in the constructivist processes 3.unpacking the term solidarity/redefining the end goal of the project for ourselves 4. developing a podcast to welcome more voices in this conversation 5. thinking of differences in the term “diaspora” and “transnational” 6. understanding and reflecting on our relative privilege as we have this conversation. 

[felicityfenton]

We know aesthetics are politics. They’re not even about politics, they are politics. Because when you ask who is defining aesthetics, at what particular point – what social class, what kind of background these people have – you realize quickly again that the most effective ideological construction are the ones that don’t look like it. If you say, I’m political, I’m ideological, that is not going to work, because people know where you are coming from. But if you say, “Hi! My name is Bob and this is it,” then they say, that’s not political. It’s invisible and it really works. I think certain elements of beauty used to attract the viewer are indispensable. I don’t want to make art just for people who can read Fredrick Jameson sitting upright on a Mackintosh chair. I want to make art for people who watch the Golden Girls and sit in a big, brown, Lazy-boy chair. They’re part of my public too

Felix Gonzalez Torres (via felicityfenton)

[nervous-condition]

KENYON-OBERLIN FORUM FOR QUESTIONS OF WORLD LITERATURE AND GLOBALIZATION, PART TWO

For the second iteration of our collaborative project, in order to generate more dialogue among students in both classes, please 1) respond to the prompt as you did the first time around, and 2) br…

I really appreciate the points that have been made on choice of narrative and form to invite the Western readers to examine their own position, instead of passively being voyeurs to other cultures and places. I would like to extend that framework of analysis to the texts as objects themselves. As we read in the two articles for yesterday, there is considerable critique of the circulation and affiliation of these texts, and the self-selecting audience that they invite to read them–a majority of these gathering points being universities and book festivals. I agree with Dana’s point about how the authors of world literatures (or books by writers from the Global South/diasporic writers), by bringing their own intersectional frameworks to their writing can challenge the attempt of the Western reader to read “other cultures” as being a single entity. However, I would like to argue that those of the West who gravitate to these readings, and have the vocabulary and language to access them, are most likely to be white liberals who are proponents of diversity and inclusion to begin with, and are most likely “of the sort who go to literary festivals. What they want is some soft criticism that does not make them feel too uncomfortable (World Lite magazine, Page 7).” Yes, the authors bring a variety of perspectives in their work, but it is important to be real with ourselves about the backgrounds of relative privilege that a lot of these authors occupy in the world (as do a lot of us, as readers) and keep that in mind when situating their work within larger contexts–South Asian/ Afro-Carribean etc. To me, the power of these texts come from their ability to speak to other people within that identity group, or those who have shared similar experiences of displacement, migration, etc, but I am rather skeptical of the transformative potential of these books, given the circuits that they travel in, and the large number of barriers one needs to overcome to access them.

Additionally, to continue the spirit of the questions that Fiona brings up, I would like to pose the following two more: Does literature in the era of globalization challenge liberal multiculturalism, or reinforce it? Also, as people who are implicated in, and agents of, globalization have we been able to empathize with texts to differing degrees, based on our proximity to the characters or setting, as we interpreted them?

[angryasiangirlsunited]

Western Exploitation of Asian Sweatshop Labor: My Experience

On tumblr, I noticed that discussions of oppression which Asian people face (usually as told by non-Asian people) boil down to fetishization, the harmful effects of the model minority stereotype, and general lack of visibility in the media.  As important as those topics are, I feel that there is another mode of oppression that affects Asian people disproportionately, especially those of us in developing countries.

Above is a photo I secretly took when I worked in an American sweatshop last year.  I wish to share my story below, along with relevant statistics relating to the Western exploitation of POC (particularly Asian) labor.  

I am a Vietnamese-American.  Like many US families, mine had been going through financial difficulties following the Great Recession.  My father had been out of work for years, leaving my mother to shoulder the burden of supporting a family of four on her salary.  I am mentally ill and my sister is developmentally disabled.  You can imagine how difficult it is for us to secure work; so when we were offered jobs, we were elated at the prospect of helping our mother with the finances.

For the three months following April 2nd, 2014, my sister and I worked at an off-the-grid spice factory.  We would often spend twelve hours on our feet, scooping spice blends into bags by hand and preparing them for shipping to grocers such as Whole Foods.  For those twelve hours, we were constantly standing and sparsely took breaks for any reason.  Of course, we were “allowed” to take breaks, but we were paid so little that doing so meant a significant loss to our wages.  (To specify, we were paid 25 cents for every unit we completed.  For every unit sold, the owner of the factory was making 5 dollars.  Some days, our work was valued so little that we were paid only 30 dollars each for a full twelve hours of work.)

We toiled in a small, cramped room with no A/C during days when the temperature often exceeded 100ºF (38ºC).  The only walking room allotted to us was a cubic foot of space surrounding the edges of the table where we worked and a narrow path to the door.  The rest of the space was occupied by various boxes, shipping supplies, and garbage.  The spices were often kept out in the open heat for hours, and there was nothing preventing insects and other contaminants from getting into the containers.  Those who checked into the room often complained of being unable to breathe.  This was the environment where my sister and I spent twelve hours a day, six days a week, for three months.

The owner of the sweatshop was a wealthy, white woman who had once been a millionaire.  She appeared to think less of us, and I could best describe her behavior as patronizing.  Oftentimes, she would reiterate that her role in the business was much more difficult than ours, even though she was often found napping or watching television while we were in the factory.  In fact, she had little to no involvement in the actual making of the product and did not know how to assemble it herself. 

She never seemed to have enough money to pay us our full salary.  She had an excuse for every payday, explaining to us that she was waiting for the customer to pay for the shipment before she could pay us.  Once, she had even spent some of my sister’s salary on groceries.  We had personally witnessed her hiring a cleaning service for her house over the phone and taking her pets to a professional groomer.  She had even discussed purchasing a new house.  Every mealtime, she would cook real steak and chicken for her three dogs and two cats while we went entire days without eating. 

The job consisted of non-stop, grinding manual labor.  I still remember crying silently as I worked because I was in so much pain.  It was to the point where I had to take pain meds to sleep at night.  At one point, I fell ill from a combination of fatigue, dehydration, and stress – I was even beginning to hallucinate during work.  Still, the owner continued to crush us with outlandish quotas to fill, ones that would have been obviously impossible to complete had she been looking at the numbers.

My sister did some research on the owner’s name and found out that her interior design business, the one which had made her a millionaire, failed due to questionable circumstances.  One of the only reviews we could salvage spoke about how she never seemed to be on-site for the job and how the client had witnessed her angrily berating and humiliating Latin@ workers she had hired.  Taking advantage of marginalized workers was not new to her.  To us, however, she had portrayed herself as a self-made businesswoman who had pulled herself up by the bootstraps and lost her business only due to unfortunate circumstances beyond her control.

Despite the abysmal conditions, we had tried to remain patient – we were relieved to have some money to bring home.  We were willing to work hard and endure demeaning treatment if it meant making our mother’s life easier.  We even spent our first paychecks on groceries and gave our mother some money so that she could afford to take our grandmother to the doctor’s.

We had finally decided to leave after having a whole day’s work undone due to an error on the owner’s part.  Once again, she conjured up an excuse as to why our paychecks were delayed.  She then ended up doubling our already impossible quota.  With a smile and some dismissive words of encouragement, she left the factory floor and headed into her office.  The hottest days of the summer months were approaching, placing us in even more danger.  We hadn’t seen payment in a month.  It was clear to us by then that she had never intended to pay us our full wage, and we left the factory that day.  We never came back.

I had taken many pictures as proof of the sweatshop’s existence, but I have never spoken publicly about my experiences until now.  Who could I have gone to?  There were few resources available to handle such injustices.  We did not have the money or the energy to take her on ourselves.  I also had my family to think about and did not want to risk possible retaliation against my mother.  It is the same reason why I have submitted this post anonymously.

In hindsight, as horrible as our situation was, we had the option of leaving the sweatshop when we could no longer tolerate the conditions.  As a Vietnamese-American, I still enjoyed various privileges and safeguards that would have not been allotted to me had I performed the same work in Vietnam.  There are many other marginalized workers who are less fortunate. 

Back to the beginning: Western exploitation of sweatshop labor is an issue all POC groups share, but it affects Asian people disproportionately. 

According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity at MIT, 43.99% of US imports are sourced directly from Asian countries, followed by about 25.6% in Canada and 22.79% in the UK.  The number of Asian imports in Australia is at a whopping 54.65%. These numbers seem insignificant until you realize that the percentage of imports from Asian countries are more than that of imports from non-Asian POC countries combined.  

From the Global Slavery Index: In 2014, almost two-thirds (65.8%) of the estimated 35.8 million people in modern slavery globally are in the Asia Pacific region.  When combined with those in the diaspora living in West Asia (7.3%), the number rises to an estimated 73%.

This is a system of oppression that all Westerners contribute to in some shape or form.  It is often one that no one wants to acknowledge because it requires people to realize their role in the systemic oppression of underprivileged POC, particularly poor Asians.  Ignorance towards your oppressive behaviors doesn’t erase the fact that you are still oppressing people.

I remember one post derailing discourse on the topic with an argument along the lines of, “We know sweatshop labor is bad!  But we Westerners are poor, too, and products of sweatshop labor are all we can afford!  Until someone else suggests a solution which makes our lives easier, we should be allowed to step on underprivileged POC without guilt!  Because we’re also poor!”  Of course, this was followed by heaps of apologism in the comments and tags by other like-minded individuals.  How can Westerners, white people and POC, claim classism and then ignore those who are most affected by it?

There is no clear or easy solution to sweatshop labor, but it is selfish to suggest that the onus is on the workers to curb Western greed.  I and other people who have experienced sweatshop labor firsthand should not have to cater to your needs to make you feel less guilty about oppressing others.  Your ability (or inability) to buy cheap things doesn’t negate the suffering many have experienced to bring those products to the shelves.

I hope that all of us can at least own up to that truth. 

Mod note:

Thank you so much for sharing your experience.

I really hope readers who want to reblog and comment of this stay respectful of OP’s experience. She obviously took a great deal of time to share her experience with us so please don’t derail. -Kat

[nervous-condition]

Reflection 2: Globalization and Literature

contd. From the Question “What is the relationship between literature and globalization?”

I have been thinking a little more about my initial response to this question, in which I said that one of the main roles of literature in a globalized era is to challenge the modernist narrative of history, a form of documenting the past that is based on systematic exclusion of certain voices and a focus on writing about great heroes, great kings and great wars.  In the ways that I have encountered it, literature has served to challenge these macro-level stories, and provide space for narratives around the quotidian aspects of history, which is in no small part impacted by what is happening around the world at the time, and is crucial in informing us of how   relations are formed around race (and/or color), class and economic status and gender. Most of the texts in the “global literature” genre (and arguably all the ones that we have read for this class) have an anti-capitalist politic, and establishes   links between local and global inequities of wealth and oppression along several different axes—seen very clearly in some texts like “Through the Arc of the Rainforest” and inconsistently in others, like “Ai Weiwei’s Blog”.  Because of the greater freedom in form and style that literature offers, over academic writing, literature is able to accommodate the great diversity of relationships in the everyday world, without having to essentialize groups of people to construct subjects to theorize on, as it often happens in academic writing. Thus, a novel like Nervous Conditions is equally important in speaking about the aftermath of the colonial legacy on the lives of Zimbabwean women, as a dissertation by the very same name. I also believe that the former furthers its politics by being more accessible to a greater variety of readers and challenges the authority of the academic industrial complex by producing and disseminating information through conduits that are not a part of it.

Since then, I have been reflecting on this concept of global literatures as being subversive spaces of knowledge production that reach a wider group of people. I was having a conversation that I was having with a friend of mine, a community organizer who works with older South Asian folks in having conversations about racism, xenophobia and misogyny within our communities, and challenging anti-Blackness, xenophobia and Hindu nationalism. They were telling me of how all the words, while having been extremely important in shaping their framework of anti-oppression, had failed them in being of use in these conversations.  Along that vein, I was thinking of how much of a reach did these novels have? Don’t you have to be an English speaker who has a certain command over the language to process these books? When I was reading “Maps for Lost Lovers” by Nadeem Aslam a South Asian-British writer, the character of the Pakistani immigrant mother in England reminded me very vividly of my own and I wanted her so badly to read the book. I remember being very insistent about this, and my mother ultimately expressed her humiliation at not being able to follow the language of the book. On my initial recall, my instinct was: “So how does it matter? How is this any better than subaltern studies; which adivasi woman in rural India can access ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’?”

On continued engagement with this topic, I think I have been able to resolve some of this frustration. I understand that it is reductive and rather harmful to dismiss bodies of work because of their inability to reach out to everyone—it is more important to focus on how people bring their frameworks to the spaces that they occupy, be it academia, literature, higher education, and any other literal or figurative space.  The cannon needs to be occupied by more women of color writers, writers from the global South, transnational and diasporic writers, those who mess with form, texture, and style. More books should use words from different languages and not provide vocabulary lists, and curse and not apologize.

[nervous-condition]

KENYON-OBERLIN FORUM FOR QUESTIONS OF WORLD LITERATURE AND GLOBALIZATION

WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LITERATURE AND GLOBALIZATION? SPECIFICALLY, HOW MIGHT THE FIELDS OF WORLD LITERATURE (CWL 333) AND DIASPORA STUDIES (ENGL 360) APPROACH THIS QUESTION DIFFERENTLY? A...

[nervous-condition]

What Neoliberalism Got to Do With It?

In her article on “Traveling Barbie”, Inderpal Grewal introduces the concept of neoliberalism as an ideology that is central to the era of globalization. While it can be argued that places and people have always been interacting with one another, the term “globalization” as it is understood now was seen with the introduction of liberal economics, encouraging free markets and reducing trade barriers among nations, which was validated by Western ideals of liberty, democracy and free enterprise. To take on the stewardship of this global world, international institutions like the United Nations gained prominence, that had no small part in perpetuating these ideologies in their discourse around multiculturalism, human rights and pacifism that were more rooted in ideas of charity than solidarity and redistribution of wealth.

While it may seem quite some distance removed, the children’s toy Barbie, also serves as the site around which discourses of liberal multiculturalism can be produced. With the opening up of markets and creation of global consumers of the American Barbie, Mattel moulded their product to appeal to children in different parts of the world while stressing a universal commonality among them. (albeit in rather racist ways--the “lady” English Barbie versus the “maid” Jamaican barbie), As Grewal says, “It seems that Mattel’s goal is that the girl child, the global subject of the UN discourse, becomes a subject of consumption” (Grewal, 808).  Mattel also held a universal summit with children from twenty eight countries, and declared that "their deliberations identified world peace as a principle concern” (Grewal, 808).  This is  reminiscent of international beauty pageants comprised of women from different countries, still adhering to a global ideal of beauty, heavily informed by the West. These pageants are marketed as events that promote harmony and goodwill among nations, as the winners are seen as ambassadors of world peace, but not with the purpose of enacting transformative change, and end up being “popular but largely uncontroversial forms of political consciousness (Rand, as quoted in Grewal, 808). Thus, in the current world order, with its insistence on diversity, but not at the expense of free enterprise, commodities are always informed by, and continue to inform the idea of neoliberalism.

[nervous-condition]

Here I am reading a passage from Rodriguez’s essay, “Welcome to the Global State: Confessions of a Queer Latina Cyber Slut”, on page 127. 

[nervous-condition]

The title song of the 2008 film "Singh is Kinng", popular as an anthem of   Sikh masculinity and power. The chorus translates to "Everyone knows that Singh (title for Sikh men) is the king of the world". The use of greenscreen to put iconic, and often Orientalist, images associated with India in the background to the song to create the illusion of the song actually having been shot in front of landmarks like the Taj Mahal and Sikh Golden Temple in North India does not escape irony. 

For this post, I would like to expand upon how the creation and existence of Khalistan, the "invented homeland" of diasporic Sikhs in the US, UK and Canada has had tremendous impact on the commercial film market of India, popularly known as "Bollywood". Appadurai argues that "deterritorialization creates new markets for film companies, art impressarios and travel agencies, who thrive on the need of the deterritorialized population for contact with its homeland" (Appadurai, 302).

It is impossible to talk about Khalistan  without acknowledging  tensions between the Sikh community and the Indian government in nation building in a newly decolonized and partitioned India. The creation of borders made it such that a large number of Sikhs were forcibly displaced from their homelands in the newly created Islamic state of Pakistan, to the Hindu-majority,  secular state of India. Like several other ethnic minorities their demand for a separate country (Suba) was rejected by the Indian government, and the Indian government consistently refused to acknowledge Sikhs as an ethnic or religious identity outside of "Hindu". Sikhs were declared as "terrorists" and "threats" and the turban was seen as a visible marker for frisking and harassment by law enforcement and government officials from partition till the 1970s and 80s. At the peak of bloody struggles between the two, in 1971, Sikh leader, Jagjit  Chauhan, moved to New York and declared the creation of a Sikh state, Khalistan, and was able to collect millions of dollars from diasporic Sikhs, who had left their place of origin either before/during partition, or after perceived persecution by the Indian government. 

The allegiance of vast numbers of Sikhs to Khalistan, mostly in the UK and Canada, is not deterred by the fact that it does not occupy physical space, with geopolitical boundaries. It is a homeland that can  best be understood with the use of Appadurai's framework of scapes--specifically, technoscape, mediascape and finascape as instruments influenced by as well as influencing ideoscape, which reinforces the existence of the ethnoscape. The relationship between the growth of Khalistan and the influence of Sikhs on Bollywood is an intimate one. Like several other ethnic and religious minorities, Sikhs had largely been portrayed as rustic farmers, or simply as sources of comic relief, prior to the 1990s. Given that Bollywood is a multi-million dollar industry, funding as well as target audience for movies dictate its changing appearance. Currently, most high budget movies are shot outside India in places without the omnipresent filth, noise and presence of brown bodies. In a huge majority of Bollywood movies, Indian families with Indian accents, lifestyles and traditions are portrayed to live in the picturesque locales of Switzerland, Italy, New Zealand, Miami, New York, LA. It is almost as if the romanticized idea of an Indian family, outside of the homeland, untainted by the surrounding culture, maintaining all of their own, is reproduced in these movies. Alongside this, an unprecedented increase in the presence of Punjabi protagonists in Bollywood movies has been seen since the late 1990s, with the current music and movie industry almost completely showing a homogenous Punjabi identity and culture. One of the many movies in which this can be seen is "Singh is Kinng", which was shot over India, Australia and Egypt and constructed the image of an assertive, desirable and dominant Sikh man who holds tremendous amounts of power over white Australians and non-Sikh Indians alike. In this and other movies like Gadar, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag and Love Aaj Kal, Bollywood has been extremely important in, as well as reflective of, the reclamation of the turban as a source of pride, from a source of persecution. 

[nervous-condition]

Reflection: Why I Am Taking Class Called “Globalization and Diaspora”

My primary investment in the class for Globalization and Diaspora comes from my attempts to understand my own identity as a diasporic South Asian woman and survivor of violence. I come from a family of Bangladeshi refugees to India, forcibly displaced by the partition, and have been living in the US for the past four years. One of the broader areas that I am interested in thinking about as I read the texts for this class is trauma--both lived, and intergenerational, on individuals, communities, and nation-states as different units of analysis. I would like to be critical of the ways in which trauma interacts with race, class, gender, geographical location and  temporal displacement (either of choice, or voluntary--although one can argue that certain folks have limited agency in choosing to migrate, given trends in demands for cheap labor). While I do not have much familiarity with the concept of somatization of trauma, I am interested in looking out for ways in which racism, sexism, xenophobia as well as the struggles of decolonization  act on bodies of people, as well as the larger body politic. 

In my personal interactions with survivors of violence from countries of the Global South, it is impossible to think of gender-based violence, without taking into account the socioeconomic  background of this violence. In understanding quotidian histories of people, as well as giving personal narratives their due value, I believe that literature is an invaluable medium. I am looking forward to deepening my understanding of and engagement with the term trauma in a "postcolonial" globalized world, through the texts and discussions in this class.