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Article Excerpt
This article elaborates a critical practice that interrogates the discursive protocols narrating the US nation's histories. It poses South Asian American genealogies as strategic sites from which the racial formation of the United States and Asian America may be explored. KEYWORDS: Asian America; South Asian American genealogies; immigrant histories; pan-ethnicity; identity politics.
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I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally. --Bharati Mukherjee, Mother Jones, January/February 1997
The picture on the cover of Mother Jones is compelling. In the middle of a cornfield, Bharati Mukherjee stands with a US flag draped, like a sari, over her left shoulder. The caption reads, "America's Changing Colors." In the carefully staged picture, the message is clear: Indian-born writer, Mukherjee, is claiming the American heartland for her own. Mukherjee asserts that she is an "American," and explains that "rejecting hyphenation is my refusal to categorize the cultural landscape into a center and its peripheries; it is to demand that the American nation deliver the promises of its dream and its Constitution to all its citizens equally." (1) In her fiction, Mukherjee has sought to colonize the American landscape with immigrants appropriating the American dream and reinventing "America." She argues, "just as the world went to the Coromandel coast, so also the world came to Salem." Her stories are about immigrants arriving in the United States with nothing more than a zest to live and the ability to dream. (2)
Mukherjee has achieved critical acclaim in the United States for her fiction and won admiration in the popular media for her politics of writing. Seen as a bold and refreshing voice from the margins, she has come to embody the possible ways in which America can re-imagine itself with public consent. Mukherjee herself spurns the margin, arguing that marginalization can be refused if minorities have the will to do so. In her "worlding of the world," the immigrant writes herself or himself into the nation. (3) Thus the territorialization of the space of the nation comes from immigrant negotiations, and not from dominant ideologies and practices of race and class. The immigrant for Mukherjee, therefore, is one whose "soul is always at risk" since there are "no comforting stereotypes to fit into." (4) Mukherjee sees herself as a new voice challenging the way America narrates itself, and this process is a means of inventing a new history for herself. Such confidence has catapulted Mukherjee into the national limelight as an immigrant grasping the American dream with courage and the determination to make this country her own.
While Mukherjee might see herself as an audacious figure on the American landscape, her rhetoric is hardly subversive. Her politics rests on, and reaffirms, the nation's mythic edifices that assert an unmarked identity at the core of "We the People." To become "American," Mukherjee enjoins the immigrant to discard her history and, in the manner of the pioneers of the frontier, to find new meanings in an alien land. Her own experiences, overcoming personal trials and tribulations to achieve success, give Mukherjee the certainty that new histories can and, indeed, are being made. These assertions, however, are based on uncritical generalizations that fail to take into account the politics of privilege that assign her place in the nation. By romanticizing "America" as a dream offered to all with no guarantees, Mukherjee disregards the differential accommodation of immigrants in the United States. She also fails to consider the ways in which the social and intellectual capital brought by immigrants mark the space from which they must negotiate the nation. Moreover, the importance of the histories that bring immigrants to the United States is also neglected, and the imaginative and material continuities of these histories are denied.
Mukherjee's position is essentially assimilationist, with the onus on immigrants to be agents of their Americanization. Cultural assimilation, in this perspective, becomes the criterion for responsible citizenship although Mukherjee does argue that she is advocating a creative transformation of what this culture might represent. Mukherjee's indifference to the ideological practices and material conditions that inscribe the ways in which immigrants are located in the nation stems from her inability to discriminate the heterogeneous ways in which genealogies constitute immigrant experiences. Moreover, her flippant approach to history as something that can be discarded at will or crafted through personal choices reveals a naivete that comes from an unambiguous sense of being American. History, for Mukherjee, must be disowned when it becomes a liability in reinventing a new self in the new world, a terrain which she appears to imagine as an immigrant's tabula rasa.
History, however, is never secure. Nor is it neatly mapped so that inconvenient parts of it may be elided. Immigrants, as Mukherjee herself admits, lead messy lives. They also bring with them complicated and vibrant stories of histories elsewhere and in-between that continue to be implicated in their new realities. In the United States, they must also confront and negotiate other histories that have inscribed particular traumas on the American landscape, as well as each other's converging or intersecting histories. Attempts to narrate these stories of immigration without acknowledging the overlapping genealogies, and the politics of their representations, engender unthinking critical practices that obfuscate the materiality of immigrant lives. Instead, a strategic jostling of multiple histories that brings to the fore not only shared narrative regimes but also the gaps between them must be advocated. Such transactional readings would open those spaces from which critical negotiations between margins and center, and between margins and what Kathleen Stewart has called the "space on the side of the road," may be effected. (5) These sites must be marked by discomfort, from which critical transactions are enacted, not from positions of authority, but from continuously contested places of narration. Moreover, a rigorous and "persistent unlearning of ... privilege," in the words of Gayatri Spivak, must accompany any politics of critical practice that is asserted from these discursive spaces. (6)
In this article, I elaborate a critical practice that interrogates the discursive protocols narrating the nation's histories and naming its imagined communities. I deploy South Asian American genealogies as places from which both the racial formation of the United States and of Asian America may be explored. (7) By placing South Asian immigrants within the contours of Asian America, I insert their histories in narratives about Asian immigration to the United States. Such historicization draws attention to the gaps in immigrant histories that locate immigrant origins in discrete sites in America's Asia. The inclusion of South Asian American genealogies of immigration in narratives of Asian America therefore insists on a transnational focus on the intersecting genealogies of Asian migration that lie within the imaginative and material contexts of colonial and post-colonial histories. (8) Moreover, in evoking South Asia as a site of Asian American histories, I blur the geographies of identity that define an Asian identity in the United States. (9)
A Strategic and Ethical Critical Intervention
The "unlearning of privilege" is crucial in acknowledging the discursive regimes and class biases that mark not only the center but also the margins. It draws attention to the impossibility of disinvesting critical analysis of political interest. Speaking from the margins and for those who inhabit these places is inevitably a subjective process since it cannot, in the words of Stuart Hall, be "unplaced" or "unpositioned." Speaking is always, as Hall notes, "positioned within a discourse." (10) Any narration, therefore, is implicated in relations of power that provide the terrain for its enunciation, while simultaneously placing limits on this enunciation. In order, then, to articulate a politics of reading that interrupts or interrogates the nation's territorialization of space, the complicities of margins and core must become visible. (11) An ethical position from which to articulate resistance or to negotiate power is possible only if, to borrow Homi Bhabha's words, the "regime of truth" that constitutes these discursive sites is acknowledged. (12) However, such unlearning of privilege should not paralyze critical intervention, leaving its practitioners in what Jean and John Comaroff have called "hyphenated states of ironic detachment." (13) Instead, it should involve a process by which conflicting and contested interests within the margins and beyond them are engaged. Such understandings would allow a contingent politics of positioning which,...
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