1. Rhetoric, understood most broadly as the art of persuasion, certainly includes the communicative goals of informing, commemorating, and entertaining (Farrell 1993). To my mind, however, one of rhetoric’s most important functions is instigating and sustaining processes of critical inquiry. These performances provide a venue for engaged questioning of topics of social importance. As such, they are crucial forms of engagement in the public sphere (Doxtader 2003). Specifically, I am interested in the ways I believe diasporic performances express both local and global knowledge and create alternative spaces of intervention and struggle.
2. The field of communications has long focused on examining how meaning in political performances is created and exchanged. An excellent early example of this type of work was completed by Bordenaue (1979), who studied communities in Northeast Brazil and reported political discourse styles among peasant groups. He observed that when leaflets were distributed to educate individuals about tuberculosis control, the materials were undeniably unsuccessful. The fundamental problem revolved around the language structure; the short sentences, simple words, and concrete meanings were not culturally sensitive to the rhetorical styles of the audience. In response, another pamphlet was created in which the information was explained through Folhetos, a traditional form of storytelling commonly used within this group. Given this rhetorical form, the participants memorized the information and later reported it to others orally.
3. Akin to other types of political performance, these street plays create a forum in which to discuss important issues related to sex-selection abortion, sexual violence, or gender discrimination. These works of imagination encompass artistry, provide tactics of intervention, and create an alternative space for civic struggles where social justice can take place (Garlough 2007, 2008).
4. Braziel and Mannur argue the word “diaspora” can be traced etymologically to the Greek “diasperien” that refers to the scattering and sowing of seeds. This sense of the word suggests a double movement—one of diffusion and another of dwelling and cultivation.
5. As a consequence, many debates on the relationship between care and justice have had much to do with the gendering of ethics and moral responses. Scholars have asked whether care and justice represent two distinct types of moral thinking or whether an approach to ethics must include and integrate both care and justice thinking (Tronto 1993). These debates are interesting to me, as they raise important questions about women’s ability to address ethical problems. Close adherents to Habermas’s notion of communicative rationality have been critiqued by feminists for pushing aside feeling, aspirations, and anxieties as relevant to debates in the public sphere (Fraiser 1990; Pajnik 2006). An ethic of care counters such justice-centered notions of rationality that Mansbridge (1990) notes “can easily mask subtle forms of control.” In addition, it brings private issues, such as domestic abuse or sexual violence, to public consideration. However, here I am not concerned with the historical origins of these debates. Rather, I am interested in how an ethic of care goes beyond the personal and private sphere to critically address large-scale social or global problems.
6. This position, I believe, requires a more encompassing sense of care than scholars like Engster (2007) are willing to grant. That is, reducing the scope of care, as Engster does, to “helping individuals to develop and sustain their basic or innate capabilities, including the abilities for sensation, movement, emotion, imagination, reason, speech, affiliation, and, in most societies today, the ability to read, write, and perform basic math” (27) excludes important categories of human endeavor to which an ethic of care might apply.
7. Critical cultural scholars like Honneth (1995) and Fraser (1997) have asserted that this is particularly problematic because recognition from the dominant culture is necessary; it is needed to build a solid sense of one’s own personal and group identity. Our identity is partially shaped by recognition or its lack. Identity is not a given. Rather, it is part of a struggle for personal, social, and political recognition. Said another way, oppressed people are obliged to engage in struggles for recognition in response to their lack of recognition from the dominant culture. This need for recognition is an outcome of the pathology of colonial or oppressive cultures.
8. In addition, she challenges notions of recognition and subjectivity by developing a concept of witnessing not grounded in the ocular; rather, subjectivity involves testifying to something that cannot be seen. She argues that through performances of witnessing and testimony, our sights are directed beyond the visible world of the eyewitness. What witnessing testifies to is not a litany of facts but a commitment to understanding subjectivity as addressability and responsibility.
9. This perspective reflects my choice to focus not only on key rhetorical situations in a community but also on the broad range of exigencies and resources available to community members over time. Through this wide lens, I examine closely the ways rhetorical practices evolve, transform, and respond to one another. In addition to providing a deep sense of context, this approach provides the scholar with yet another means of considering power issues. Katriel notes this is particularly important for researchers studying immigrant groups in Western society, because their position vis-à-vis the host majority is often marked by social disadvantage and power disparities.
1. The American Federation of Labor in the early 1900s was an organization of 2.5 million. Young was a special representative of this organization at the First International Convention of the Asiatic Exclusion League of North America, Seattle, February 3, 1908.
2. See Radha Hegde’s (2002) “Postcolonial approaches to communication: Charting the terrain, engaging the intersections” in Communication Theory.
3. One of the first records of a South Asian in America appears in a 1670 colonial diary that mentions a sailor from Madras accompanying a sea captain on a visit to Salem, Massachusetts (La Brack 1988; Prashad 2000).
4. For example, the records of Pennsylvania’s Abolition Society include a petition by a James Dunn, originally from Calcutta, who was indentured as an eight-year-old boy to the mate of a ship. He was traded many times and severely punished for endeavoring to escape and free himself (Jensen 1988, 13). Many of those who survived married into the black community.
5. The University of Wisconsin was considered a progressive institution and enrolled the largest number of Indian students in the United States at this time. In 1912, there were eleven Hindu students: nine from Bengal, one from Bombay, and one from the United Provinces. The students included Nabin Chandra Das, Baneswar Das, Rajani Kanto Das, M. S. Birendranath Das Gupta, Raghubar Dayal Gupta, Barendra Kumar Palit, Rajendra Narayan Chowdhury, Shankar Pagar, Khagendra Narayan Mirta, Hemendra Kisore Rakshit, and Basanta Kumar Roy.
6. Both of these perspectives assume that women would have migrated if the opportunity were present. That is, the decision to migrate was an individual decision rather than a collective household strategy. By contrast, Mazumdar argues that it is unlikely that large numbers of married women would have immigrated, even if the laws had allowed it. This has much to do with the economic system that was built around women’s labor on farms and in homes. At the turn of the century, one-third of the land in Punjab was used for farming and women were often in charge of weeding fields, milking cattle, churning, and cleaning stalls, as well as household chores, child rearing, and caring for the elderly. Consequently, women’s labor was very difficult to replace. However, the labor of sons, especially second and third sons, was dispensable on a farm. This goes a long way toward explaining, in addition to cultural and legal reasons, why so few women migrated to America.
7. This aesthetic practice, an important part of the discursive repertoire of many Indians in colonial, nationalist, and postcolonial contexts, involved a sense of play (lila) that provided speakers and audiences in these complex social situations a means for flexible transformation that has enabled the coexistence of rich and historically diverse cultural traditions. It allowed Indian reformers and intellectuals during the colonial era to appropriate foreign forms of knowledge and argue for socioreligious reforms, while at the same time guarding a sense of cultural authenticity and tradition (Hatcher 1999).
8. This movement drew into its midst a group of wealthy individuals interested in neotranscendentalism and communal living. Lecture series and yoga classes were organized at Unitarian churches, philosophical societies, and community groups. Vedanta centers or “peace retreats” opened from California to Connecticut. There is no doubt that the success of the Vedanta movement had much to do with its flexibility in negotiating themes of tradition and modernity, mysticism and social action through an eclectic discourse that drew upon both South Asian and Western rhetorical traditions.
9. Proceedings of the Asiatic Exclusion League, San Francisco, March 1908: 13.
10. Ct. Curry, secretary of state, wrote this in a June 30, 1910, letter to A. E. Voell, secretary-treasurer of the Asiatic Exclusion League. The letter can be found in the correspondence from Candidates for Federal and State Offices, Farmer’s Co-op and Educational Societies of California on the Asiatic Question, 1910.
11. Indeed, at the First International Convention of the Asiatic Exclusion League, Chairman Tveitmaoe states: “God Almighty placed certain barriers around different races. He has given to each a special locality for a home. Mongolians and whites never have camped under the same fig tree and never can dwell together in peace” (Proceedings of the first International Convention of the AEL, 4).
12. Asiatic Exclusion League Proceedings, September 1910: 10–11.
13. The first federal laws restricting immigration were enacted in 1875 and 1882.
14. In order to limit South Asians’ liberties—the very ones it was argued they could not understand—this group advocated a series of limitations upon civil rights and asked politicians to put these into law. During election seasons, pamphlets were published that explicitly listed these demands and the names of public officials who had committed to them. So we find letters like the following:
… I beg to state that I am heartily in favor of forbidding and prohibiting Asiatics for owning or acquiring real property in the state of California and I shall favor all legislation that can be enacted to that end … I believe that no Asiatic child or Oriental should be permitted to sit in our schools with our white children … the intermarriage of white persons with Chinese, Japanese, Hindus or any other colored race is, to my mind, a positive menace to our civilization, and can have no other effect than to break down our American ideals and institutions, and I would strongly urge an extension of our present law so as to prohibit all such intermarriages.
15. Census records show that Roy lived in New York in 1918 and registered for the draft in WWI and WWII.
16. Wisconsin Alumni Magazine, vol. 13, no. 8.
17. Wisconsin Alumni Magazine, vol. 13, no. 8.
18. Das had fled India in 1905 to avoid imprisonment for political agitation, made his way to Japan, and stayed there disguised as a Hindu ascetic until he was extradited by British officials. Escaping to Canada, Das founded the Swadesh Sevek Home, a boarding school for the children of South Asian immigrants that also held evening classes teaching English and math for adults. In 1907, he established the Hindustani Association in Vancouver. Then, in 1908, he began the journal Free Hindustan, written in English—one of the first South Asian publications in North America. Its motto was “To protest against all tyranny is a service to humanity and the duty of civilization.” In articles like A Direct Appeal to the Sikhs (September–October 1909) he wrote, “Coming into contact with free people and institutions of free nations, some of the Sikhs, though laborers in the North American Continent, have assimilated the idea of liberty and trampled the medals of slavery.” This discourse was not well received and he was deported from Canada in 1908. Das took this opportunity to enroll in the University of Washington’s political science department.
19. Gadar is an Urdu/Punjabi word that means “mutiny” or “rebellion” or “revolt.” The Gadar movement was housed at 436 Hill Street, San Francisco. Its original home was known as Yugantar Ashram.
20. Specifically, Ramnath (2005) argues the Bengalis in Gadar approached the problem of British colonialism from a position of Western-influenced rationalism, a Bengali tradition of Kropotkinism, spiritual nationalism, and leftist radicalism. In contrast, the Punjabis advocated for a more liberal democratic nationalism or anticolonial form of communism that seemed to pair well with the traditions of Sikhism. “Inspired by the nationalist movements of the previous century, particularly Mazzini’s Italian Risorgimento, [the Gadar movement] had close ties of solidarity with Irish and Egyptian opponents of British colonialism, as well as with Pan-Asianist and, more problematically, with Pan-Islamist movements against Western imperialism” (Ramnath 2005, 8). Together, the elite members of the Gadar movement were associated with networks of socialists and anarchists in North America, Japan, and Europe.
21. Har Dayal’s political philosophy, according to Don Dignan, “was a distinctive amalgam of western anarchism and Hindu revivalism, [which] did not prevent him from welding together into the first purely secular Indian revolutionary organization a cross-section of very disparate groups and individuals who comprised the hitherto unorganized and sporadic revolutionary movement” (18).
22. On November 1, 1913, members of Gadar began printing a self-titled paper, with the goal of stirring debate about India’s freedom in diasporic South Asian communities around the world. Published in the Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, and Pushto languages, this paper was sent to South Asians living in the United States, Canada, Fiji, Sumatra, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Hankow, Java, Singapore, Malaya, Siam, Burma, East Africa, and, of course, throughout the Indian subcontinent. In it, Har Dayal wrote: “Today there begins in foreign lands, but in our country’s tongue, a war against the British Raj …. What is our name? Mutiny. What is our work? Mutiny. Where will mutiny break out? In India.”
23. http://www.sukh-history.com/sikhist/personalities/sarabha.html.
24. Pressured by the British, the U.S. Government began a series of investigations that alleged Gadar members violated U.S. laws and engaged in secret negotiations with German leaders. They also claimed Gadar members sought to incite rebellion against the British, our allies in World War I. In April 1918, a conspiracy trial was held in San Francisco (La Brack 1988; Shah 1999).
25. During this time, when there was very little social support, Gadar leaders found kinship in the Irish revolutionary brotherhood. It could be argued that their work paved the way for the coming of Indian independence.
26. Wilson had vetoed the bill on January 28, 1915, stating that the legislation would “undoubtedly enhance the efficiency and improve the methods of handling immigration,” but that his duty to the Constitution left him no choice but to dissent.
27. Dr. Bhagat Singh Thind (letter to the Editor, “The Mahratta” Poona from Linton, Oregon, January 22, 1922). In Varma 1995, 125.
28. Thind had come to the United States in 1913 to pursue university education. On July 22, 1918, he was recruited by the U.S. Army to fight in World War I and was quickly promoted to the rank of acting sergeant. He received an “honorable discharge” on December 16, 1918, with full commendations. Nevertheless, five years later he found his citizenship rights being revoked. In a letter to the editor in a Linton, Oregon, newspaper, Thind wrote, it is “a battle for recognition we Indians are fighting in this country!”
29. At this time, Associate Justice Sutherland wrote the opinion of the Court, declaring that although “Caucasian” and the words “White person” often are treated as synonymous: “‘Caucasian’ is a conventional word of much flexibility, as a study of the literature dealing with racial questions will disclose, and while it and the words of ‘white persons’ are treated as synonymous for the purposes of that case, they are not identical meaning idem per idem …. The intention was to confer the privilege of citizenship upon that class of persons whom the fathers knew as white, and to deny it to all who could not be so classified.”
30. Thind applied for and received U.S. citizenship through the state of New York a few years after his original U.S. citizenship was revoked by the U.S. Supreme Court.
31. See “Hindus Here Burn Miss Mayo’s Book,” New York Times, January 22, 1928, and “Forgive Miss Mayo,” Jan Kothanda Ram, Letter to the Editor, February 22, 1928.
32. Baroda: Laxmi Printing Press, 1934.
33. Bose cites a newspaper article from the Chattanooga Daily Times, February 13, 1918, titled “Tortured and Then Burned.”
34. Reprinted from On Common Ground: World Religions in America, Columbia University Press, CD-ROM, 3rd ed.
35. See “Racial Attacks Evoke Self-Scrutiny,” Hinduism Today, January 1989.
36. See Michelle Marriot, “In Jersey City: Indians Protest Violence,” New York Times, October 12, 1987: B1.
37. In 1996, immigration law changed again, compromising the rights of longtime South Asian residents in the United States. Under this new legislation, South Asian Americans could be detained and deported without proper representation in court. Even relatively minor misdemeanors committed twenty years prior, including shoplifting, could lead to one’s deportation from the United States.
38. Congress, in Section 280003(a) of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (28 U.S.C. 994 note), defines a hate crime as “a crime in which the defendant intentionally selects a victim, or in the case of a property crime, the property that is the object of the crime, because of the actual or perceived race, color, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation of any person.”
39. Government policies such as the U.S. patriot act, the Absconder Initiative, and Special Registration program have resulted in mass deportations and detentions. Indeed, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) claims that the special registration program is “the worst in a series of counter-productive and increasingly draconian policies implemented in the name of national security.” Although it has now ended, Special Registration was the most visible and systematic government-instituted program to detain members of specific ethnic groups in the United States since the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
40. These types of sentiments show no signs of abating. For example, in response to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, former Arkansas governor and one-time Republican frontrunner Mike Huckabee stated: “We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there is any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country. We just need to be very, very thorough in looking at every aspect of our own security internally because again, we live in a very, very dangerous time.” Huckabee’s senior advisor, James Pinkerton, who worked in the White House under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, warned in September 2007 of a “Muslimization” of America—reminiscent of sentiments expressed a century earlier by members of the Asiatic Exclusion League—and concluded that “to keep the peace, we must separate our civilizations.” In a January 2008 interview with Mother Jones editor David Corn, Pinkerton stated that America needs “a cop in front of every mosque,” flatly assuming threat and danger on the basis of religion and nationality. In July 2012, five Republican members of the House of Representatives, including Michele Bachman, alledged that longtime aid to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood through her late father, mother, and brother. In response, Republican senator John McCain took the Senate floor to refute these allegations, stating, “Ultimately, what is at stake in this matter is larger even than the reputation of one person. This is about who we are as a nation, and who we aspire to be. What makes America exceptional among the countries of the world is that we are bound together as citizens not by blood or class, not by sect or ethnicity, but by a set of enduring, universal, and equal rights that are the foundation of our constitution, our laws, our citizenry, and our identity. When anyone, not least a member of Congress, launches specious and degrading attacks against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they are and ignorance of what they stand for, it defames the spirit of our nation, and we all grow poorer because of it” (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/07).
41. The population of India alone is more than a billion people, the second highest national population in the world after China and nearly one-sixth of the planet’s population. India is the world’s largest democracy, with twenty-three official languages and more than one thousand dialects spoken. Within the nation’s twenty-eight states, there exists a rich variety of regional and tribal cultures, in addition to a wide array of religious affiliations including Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, and Zoroastrianism. Consequently, South Asian American community identities now exhibit a notable degree of variance within worldviews and lifestyles. Indeed, as Khilnani reminds us, “India—contrary to the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] dream of a homogeneous nation—daily becomes more, not less, diverse as ideas proliferate about what it should be” (Khilnani 1999, xiv). The situation becomes even more complex when you add in the migrant situations of the Trinidanian Indians, East African Indians, Malaysian Indians, British Indians, or Indians coming from the Middle East.
Yet, for many, their identity refers not so much to national affiliations, but to an elaborate network of regional culture, dialect, and custom. This fragmentation, of course, is not surprising given that India was composed of separate and distinct princely states prior to and during British rule and did not become a nation in the formal sense of the term until slightly more than fifty years ago. Indeed, India is still developing a sense of what it means to be “Indian.” Many individuals connect much more closely to regional or religious identities than to some national loyalty. Thus, it is relatively easy to understand how adopting a South Asian American identity might be challenging for some immigrants, particularly those in the first generation. Loyalties to an Indian homeland unite this diverse group on many levels, providing a collective sense of identity. But like all groups, they must struggle against their own discrepancies, “which lie precisely in the fact that they are composed of individuals, self-conscious individuals, whose differences from each other have to be resolved and reconciled to a degree which allows the group to be viable and cohere” (Cohen 1985, 11). For these reasons, the answer to the question, “Who are you?” is markedly negotiable for many South Asian Americans. While in a group of other South Asians, a person might identify himself or herself regionally, as a Gujarati. Yet, while at work, surrounded by non-South Asians, a person might choose the label South Asian, South Asian American, Indian, Pakistani, Indian American, Asian American, Asian, or just American. Strategically with the response provided, the answer often depends upon who is asking the question and why.
42. This is largely a function of the secondary immigration of extended family members that resulted from sponsorship by established “brain drain” immigrants, which drew more economically heterogeneous individuals yet ethnically homogeneous communities of South Asians to the United States during the 1990s. In post-9/11 America, religious divisions have also become starker. Indeed, the multiple ways of being “South Asian” has much to do with the diversity of South Asia itself, which has frequently experienced bouts of communal violence between Hindus and Muslims, sometimes involving other social groups like upper caste and Dalits.
43. From the group’s Web site: http://www.samarmagazine.org/.
44. Other notable groups include the Asian Pacific Americans for Progress—a national grassroots group that facilitates progressive political action through political dialogue on Internet blogs—and the South Asian American Voting Youth (SAAVY)—an organization committed to guaranteeing the equal and full participation by South Asians in the civic and political life of the United States. In an attempt to connect minority groups, the Coalition for an Egalitarian and Pluralistic India has sponsored parades to simultaneously mark the anniversaries of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and MLK.
45. Indeed, South Asian women residing in the United States appear to be at particularly high risk for intimate partner violence. In recent studies, 35 percent of South Asian American women report intimate partner violence in their current relationship (Dasgupta 2007, 3). Of even more concern, some within the South Asian community report an increase in domestic violence after 9/11 due to high levels of stress, fear, a weakened economy, and intense scrutiny by law enforcement and locals (Ebrahhim 2001). Yet, in recent years, many South Asian domestic violence victims are deterred from seeking public services or leaving battering spouses, for fear of jeopardizing their immigration status and/or custody of their children.
1. The names of performers have been changed to protect their anonymity.
2. In SILC Yearbook 1994, 9.
3. This legislation allowed up to 20,000 people from India to enter the United States annually. In 1990, the Minnesota South Asian community comprised a little more than 8,000 individuals, nearly 75 percent of them living in Hennepin County or Ramsey County. This number increased 200 percent from 1980 to 1990. According to the 2000 census, in the Minneapolis/ St. Paul community the number has reached 14,535.
4. Polly Sonifer, “Interview with Neena Gada,” 2002. SILC Oral History Project, Minnesota State Historical Society, 27.
5. Polly Sonifer, “Interview with Preeti Mathur,” 2002. SILC Oral History Project, Minnesota State Historical Society, 21.
6. From 1979 to 1988, SILC used the Commonwealth Community Center; from 1988 to 1992, they reserved St. Anthony Park Elementary. Currently, the school is located at Como Park Senior High School and meets every Saturday after Labor Day through early May.
7. Polly Sonifer, “Interview with Neena Gada,” 2002. SILC Oral History Project, Minnesota State Historical Society, 17.
8. Polly Sonifer, “Interview with Rama Padamnashan,” 2002. SILC Oral History Project, Minnesota State Historical Society, 20.
9. During the time I was working at SILC, students participated in the Minnesota Asian American festival and marched in a parade with two dozen other Asian American organizations that concluded with a festival that included food, entertainment, and an information booth. SILC students also celebrated India’s fiftieth anniversary of independence with the India Association of Minnesota. Here, students sang the Indian national anthem and heard older community members recount their personal stories relating India’s independence movement. These performance experiences encouraged deliberation and debate, broadened the students’ critical consciousness, and taught them the value of participating in the public sphere. During Diwali, students and teachers celebrated with a traditional Indian shadow puppet show and students made diyas in art class to display for parents. Later in the year, many students participated in a Festival of India celebration performing in a Mohini Attam dance.
10. Polly Sonifer, “Interview with Neena Gada,” 2002. SILC Oral History Project, Minnesota State Historical Society, 17.
11. However, it is easy to see how an event predicated upon the issue of ethnic and national identity could also kindle political, economic, social, or cultural antagonisms and rivalries. In response to such potential conflict, festival organizers work to avoid points of contention that may divide or antagonize other groups. As I learned in a Festival of Nations organizational meeting, this orientation is maintained through a series of rules and regulations that are strictly enforced. No symbolism or logos of an inflammatory nature may be displayed and no items containing political or racial statements or slogans can be displayed, reproduced, or sold. To avoid controversy, no maps or names of countries are used in the booths, only the names of the people from a given area and one flag no larger than 3×5. Further, exhibits at the Festival of Nations may only involve the display of cultural articles “worthy of the culture” and “typical and in keeping with the theme” (Festival of Nations Procedures and Policies 2000, 29). Finally, no title of a specific organization or club representing an ethnic community may be displayed. All of these rules, strictly enforced, function to contain and control festival discourse. Yet, despite all the attempts to neutralize discourse, the political nature of the festival is simply unavoidable. From the focus upon nationalism to questions of cultural domain, the issues at the heart of the festival naturally breed controversy. Even the rules, meant to diffuse potential conflict, can be construed as problematic. That is, while festival organizers have an opportunity to help disenfranchised individuals and groups be heard, their role as culture brokers sometimes leads them to ignore some practices and peoples while promoting others. Therefore, while it might be the festival organizers’ intent to downplay political speech, the festival is without a doubt a political venture as has been noted by folklore scholars from Bauman and Sawin (1991) to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1991).
1. Shyamala, of course, is just one of a growing number of South Asian and South Asian American women who use dance as a medium for public activism (Garlough 2007, 2008). In the South Asian American community, Ananya Chatterjea, a University of Minnesota assistant professor of dance, recently founded “Women in Motion.” This performing company of South Asian artists creates political theater and performs in community-based and other artistic forums. Chatterjea explains, “I do political theater, using dance to tell ordinary stories about ordinary people and to address violence. I am interested in being someone who has something to say, to inspire social change, to invite people into political thought … The world is a mess and I thought ‘How can I dance this dance about beauty and spirituality when I see what is going on around me: violence, patriarchy, class hierarchy?’” (Minnesota “Body Language,” July/August 2003, 32). Chatterjee notes that the reaction to her work from the South Asian community is mixed; “Some say, ‘Where were you all these years?’ But some said, ‘You’re washing our dirty laundry in public.’ They thought people would think that India is terrible. I said, ‘No, I’m showing how Indian women resisted violence’” (Minnesota “Body Language,” July/August 2003, 33).
2. Shyamala and Sandra had worked together on a project called InnerDiVisions before collaborating with Anjali. Soon after, Sangita added the dimension of video/film for dance.
3. See Post Natyam Web page, http://www.postnatyam.net/.
4. See Post Natyam Web page, http://www.postnatyam.net/.
5. See Post Natyam Web page, http://www.postnatyam.net/. Through their performances and research interests, Post Natyam Collective members hope to develop “a critical awareness of the politics surrounding South Asian dance forms and our contemporary realities.” The research of Post Natyam Collective members takes many forms. It often “blends the line between art-making and academic scholarship.” Their scholarly output includes published academic papers, conference presentations, lectures, copy editorial work, art books, and archival documentation of the collective’s creative processes. In doing so, the Post Natyam Collective engages in “scholarly research that reflects its critical, border-crossing approach to contemporary South Asian performance” (http://www.postnatyam.net/).
6. In addition, Post Natyam commitment to an egalitarian or democratic approach to organizing has had a significant impact upon the work they produce. They note, “We have chosen the collective as an organizational model because it gives voice to different perspectives, allows us to pool resources, and encourages democratic dialogue. This model contrasts with a traditional western dance company model, which embodies a single choreographer’s artistic vision, and from the classical guru-shisya model, where students are dedicated to only one teacher” (http://www.postnatyam.net/).
7. Because Post Natyam is a collective, the members “often work in modular fashion, assembling our repertoire in different ways to create various thematically related evening length performances. This means solos, duets, or ensemble pieces are available and can be booked individually or together as determined by the presenting organization in conjunction with the choreographers” (http://www.postnatyam.net/).
8. Moreover, the “racial profiling, long under attack in some parts of the United States, became acceptable to many who might earlier have objected to the practice. Along with that, detentions by the state were widespread and undertaken without any shred of evidence. Sikh men, with turbans and beards, bore a special burden of ‘looking Muslim’ given that Osama bin Laden who was accused by the United States of masterminding the attacks also had a turban and a beard” (Grewal 2005, 210).
9. It seems important to note that being misidentified as a terrorist is a real problem even now.
10. SAALT also adds the following: “We would be remiss, however, if we didn’t mention that in addition to tales of terror were many of hope. In many communities throughout the United States, Americans were responsive and even pro-active in reassuring their Muslim, Sikh, Arab, and South Asian American neighbors that they would stand with them. Acts of kindness and compassion included public statements and vigils, editorials denouncing stereotypes, interfaith worship, and simply patronizing the businesses owned by Middle Eastern and South Asian entrepreneurs” (SAALT 2008).
11. Of course, this does not mean that there were no differences in South Asian Americans’ post-9/11 experiences. It is clear that some communities had better experiences than others. However, as Cainkar points out, it also seems clear that most communities faced some degree of challenge post-9/11, with regard to how they lived their lives in a state of “homeland insecurity” (116).
12. As Katrak (2007) notes, “There are positive nurturing aspects of practicing traditional arts, there are also disturbing resonances of nationalist deployments of the dance for fundamentalist ideologies. Specifically, Bharata Natyam …. is given exclusionary connotations as though no other forms do not exist apart from those practiced by the Hindu majority” (219).
13. The concept of intersectionality has deep roots in the early work of Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois.
14. In addition, the concept of intersectionality also has been developed by communications and rhetoric scholars. For example, Enck-Wanzer (2006) has used the notion of “intersectional rhetoric” to describe “a rhetoric that places multiple rhetorical forms (in this case speech, embodiment, and image) on relatively equal footing, is not leader centered, and draws from a number of diverse discursive political or rhetorical conventions” (177). Here, there is a commitment to studying the complicated ways that bodies, words, and silences can draw upon and combine cultural traditions and popular culture. This puts rhetoric scholars in dialogue with performance studies scholars, who research body rhetoric in order to understand the ways that nonverbal forms serve to bolster testimony and political discourse. Interestingly, scholars from other disciplines have used a variety of metaphors to describe this type of discourse and performance. These metaphors range from borderland, “mestizaje,” hybridity, strategic essentialism, or a third space.
15. Eclecticism has a deeply rooted intellectual history in India; examples can be seen in a variety of philosophical and religious texts written as early as 1000 BCE. Eclecticism is evident in the Jain view of truth known as anakantavada, the Hindu Vedas, Puranas, and Yogasastras, and Nagarjuna’s Mahayana Buddhist dialectic. Far from being a monolithic phenomenon rooted in ancient texts, eclecticism exists in many varieties, its differences often being based upon the other philosophical perspectives with which it comes into contact. So, one might speak of a democratic eclecticism that seeks to build consensus, as seen in the discourse of Rammohun Roy during the Indian Renaissance or the postmodern eclecticism of Salman Rushdie that calls attention to the hybridity and disjunctures within postcolonial and transnational identities (Garlough 2007; Hatcher 1999).
1. The last names of participants have been omitted to protect their anonymity, unless requested otherwise.
2. For example, like The Vagina Monologues, Yoni Ki Baat works toward ending the silence around violence against women in South Asian culture. Here, women confront difficult issues that range from domestic abuse to incest to rape. In doing so, these women draw upon a long legacy of feminist activists and scholars who advocate for the power of speaking the truth in public places—not only because it brings issues of importance to the fore, but also because it works to connect women through discourses of care and concern. As Lorde so eloquently argued, “My silences did not protect me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with some women while we examined words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me the strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living” (81–82).
3. In addition to being performed at Yoni ki Baat, this poem was later published on Roopa’s blog, political poet(ry) on July 10, 2007 (http://politicalpoet.wordpress.com/?s=surviving+sexual+abuse). Here she recounts her experience, the reasons she composed the poem, and why she feels it is important to share her story with others. The intent of this chapter is not to attest to the veracity of her story of sexual violence but to focus attention on how she uses performance for political purposes.
4. The Vagina Monologues has been translated into over forty-five languages, appearing in theaters around the globe and hailed as a “feminist classic” although it is only a decade old (Bell and Reverby 2005). Indeed, as Cooper (2007) notes, “By now The Vagina Monologues is a worldwide phenomenon. Much more than a dramatic script, the play is a mass culture event, performed hundreds of times each year” (727). A testament to its popularity, HBO aired an original documentary of the play in 2002 that generated high ratings. Many attribute the power of The Vagina Monologues to its transgressive content and carnivalesque public nature. Performing the personal publicly, women’s private experiences are played out on a stage and celebrate typically disparaged expressions of desire, fantasies, or physical body parts, such as the vagina (Bell and Reverby 2005). In doing so, The Vagina Monologues draws from a long history of feminist political practices or what could be called the “old bones” of sisterhood (Bell and Reverby 2005, 431). In a sense, it is a reclamation project that relates closely to work on the women’s health movement that “takes back” the female body for women in the same spirit as the feminist text Our Bodies Ourselves. It also bears close resemblance to work done in early self-help movements and consciousness-raising groups. For example, in terms of feminist performances, Bell (2005) notes, that it is not unusual for feminist performers to conduct interviews with other women and use this material to deliver “other women” on stage in addition to themselves.
5. The proceeds funded two shelters for women and girls and the extensive national and local press coverage put a news spotlight on Indian women’s experience of violence and local efforts to confront it. The V-day events hosted by Jagon and Sangat (two leading South Asian feminist organizations) also included a three-day conference in Delhi entitled “Confronting Violence, Recounting Resistance, Envisioning Justice.” Here, women from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Germany, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United States presented research on violence against women in South Asia and its relationship to militarism, fundamentalism, and globalization (http://www.vday.org).
1. My thinking about the importance of “questions” to rhetorical performances owes much to my participation in USC’s Rhetorical Theory Conferences.
2. What is surprising, however, is that very few scholars seek to consider the more important question of why such rhetorical work has gone understudied. Certainly, language barriers often make such research particularly challenging for those who are not a part of the cultural group under consideration (Blake 1979). Further, studying contemporary non-Western, ethnic, or immigrant rhetoric often requires an understanding of present-day politics as well as thoughtful investigation of historical, economic, and societal contexts. For example, in chapter 2, I argued that in order to understand Sudhindra Bose’s calls for recognition and acknowledgment in his Chautauqua lectures and books addressing South Asian immigration and anti-British rule, a rhetorical analysis should also pay attention to the historical and economic context of pre-independence India, the diverse rhetorical strategies of Indian intellectuals and politicians, as well as the anti-immigration rhetoric in the United States. Another important reason that non-Western, immigrant, or ethnic rhetoric often goes unnoticed is because the rhetorical practices are not in a form that scholars of rhetoric traditionally recognize. Studying rhetorical modes, media, and situations—some of them significantly different from those found in the West—requires not only a firm grasp on rhetorical theory but also a thorough grounding in the target group’s culture (Blake 1979). As Starosta suggests, such rhetoric often “remains invisible to the untrained eye and lies beneath the surface of culture” (Starosta 1979). Researchers must be prepared to analyze both discursive and nondiscursive texts, attending to both local and popular variation upon forms. For example, in this book I have shared how Indian folk songs, appropriated by members of the Gadar movement, were used rhetorically to publicly perform critiques of British violence and the suffering it inflicted upon Indian people. These songs were strategically employed to stir support for rebellion and what would later be a fight for independence.
3. In Hinduism, for example, as the gods and goddesses play, the invention and destruction of the world is their game. This sense of creation as play is apparent in vernacular religious performances, such as the Rasa lila (translated literally as “performance of play,” or as it is more widely known, the Dance of Divine Love).
4. For these reasons, critical play, to my mind, is best characterized by a sense of wandering and ambiguity, as suggested by Dotader (2007). Indeed, as Caputo notes, the word ambiguity itself is derived from the Latin agere “to act” and comes from the verb ambigere “to wander” (ambi—around—and agere—to do). In critical play, the audience is asked to wander with the rhetorical performance, tolerate disjunctures, ruptures of context, and apparent betrayals of meaning, as they learn to become at home in a world that is plural. This play attempts to deliver a message without covering or explaining away what remains baffling about it and the other in it. It invites a “poetically rigorous attentiveness to language, a reading of words against themselves … working language against itself, delivering its silence” (Ziarek 1994, 10). In doing so, it brings language close to Otherness, showing forth strangeness and foreignness for political purposes.