Affecting Space: South Asian American Activism and the Visual Politics of Home

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-292
Author(s):  
Falu Bakrania

Extending the archive of South Asian American visual culture to the kinds that community activists use in public spaces expands our understanding of how such cultures contest dominant discourses of home. In this article, I examine how the uses of theatre, photography, and clothing by the San Francisco Bay Area-based “Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour,” and the anti-domestic violence exhibit I Dare to Air created by Maitri, generate particular affective relationships to public and private space. These relationships in turn produce resistant knowledges of “home” that challenge the racist logics of the Trump administration and the violent logics of a rising Indian American capitalist class. The work of community activists thus demands that we invigorate space as an analytic through which we theorize the import of South Asian American visual culture.

Author(s):  
Bakirathi Mani

South Asian American visual culture is a diverse field of visual art, created by artists who are first-, second- and third-generation immigrants from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, among other diasporic locations (e.g., Kenya). South Asian American artists work in a range of media forms, including photography, sculpture, installation, video, painting, and drawing. Collectively, these artworks are frequently exhibited in museums and galleries as depictions of contemporary South Asian immigrant life. However, a close reading of individual works produces a more dynamic picture. Instead of viewing South Asian American visual culture solely in terms of artists’ own immigrant biographies, scholarship and museum practices have begun to focus on how its aesthetic and political contributions have been central to the representation of racialized, gendered, and sexualized immigrant bodies in the United States since the turn of the millennium. Drawing across archival collections, aesthetic histories, and digital media forms, artists create works that link the colonial documentation of “native” bodies on the subcontinent with the surveillance and documentation of immigrant bodies by the US state. Alongside artists, academics and activists also work to produce curatorial interventions through exhibitions that generate feminist and queer critiques of the relation between nation-state and diaspora. Emphasizing the transnational ties of capital and labor that bind together the subcontinent with the United States, South Asian American visual culture creates new frameworks for the relationship between race, visuality, and representation.


Author(s):  
Shilpa S. Davé

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine the representations and stereotypes of South Asian Americans in relation to immigrant narratives of assimilation in American film and television. It theorizes the performance of accent as a means of representing race and particularly national origin beyond visual identification. For South Asians, accent simultaneously connotes difference and privilege. To focus on an Indian vocal accent is to reconsider racialization predicated on visual recognition. The remainder of the chapter discusses vocal accents and racial hierarchies; South Asian American and Indian American identities; popular Culture, Orientalism, and racial performance; and comedy and racial performance. It concludes with an overview of the subsequent chapters.


2021 ◽  
Vol 162 ◽  
pp. S195
Author(s):  
Katherine Jane Chua ◽  
Masra Shameem ◽  
Amal Amir ◽  
Joyce Varughese

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