De/colonizing the exotic: Teaching "Asian women" in a U.S. classroom

Frontiers

Volumn 21, Issue 1-2, 2000, Pages 87-110

  Chatterjee, Piya ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0034362231     PISSN: 01609009     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3347034     Document Type: Review

References (35)

1. I use the combined diacritics of slash and hyphen to indicate the important ways in which "Asian" identity politics in the United States are complicated by various immigrant experiences whose primary alignments reside in a territorially distant "Third World" as well as within the "Third World" politics of being an Asian, minority, and sometimes working-class community in the United States. I add the slash and hypen to register difficulties of assuming that binary or bifurcated positioning. The slash, in particular, punctuates the disjunctures within the staggered economies of identification. I am indebted to Grace Poore's critical reflections about the contested permeability of the category "South Asian" and its vexed relationship with a certain U.S.-centric Asian American positioning. She notes that "while U.S. acceptance of the identity of "Asian American" is anothei victory in the struggle for setting the record straight in U.S. social history, the term, unfortunately, subsumes those of us who are Asian but not American" ("The Language of Identity," in A Patchwork Shawl: Chronicles of South Asian Women in America, ed. Shamita Das Dasgupta [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998], 25-26).
2. Leila Ahmed, "Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Veil," Feminist Studies 8:3 (1982): 521-34. See Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in the Photography of the Middle East, 1860-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Yasmina Bouziane is a Moroccan photographer and filmmaker based in New York. Her work includes multimedia exhibitions, videography, photography, and film and offers trenchant postcolonial and feminist critiques of "orientalist" representation through both archival and contemporary popular "texts." Ali Baba is a short video montage of film and media representations of sexuality and gendered otherness in contemporary depictions of the "Middle East."
3. Leila Ahmed, "Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Veil," Feminist Studies 8:3 (1982): 521-34. See Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in the Photography of the Middle East, 1860-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Yasmina Bouziane is a Moroccan photographer and filmmaker based in New York. Her work includes multimedia exhibitions, videography, photography, and film and offers trenchant postcolonial and feminist critiques of "orientalist" representation through both archival and contemporary popular "texts." Ali Baba is a short video montage of film and media representations of sexuality and gendered otherness in contemporary depictions of the "Middle East."
4. For an interesting ethnographic discussion about how the actual hijab, or the practice of veiling, is deployed hybridly and as a sign of resistance within Pakistani immigrant identity-making, see '"We Are Graceful Swans Who Can Also Be Crows': Hybrid Identities of Pakistani Muslim Women," in Dasgupta, A Patchwork Shawl, 56-58.
5. I place quotations around the category of "white" to indicate the ways in which my perception of this student's "whiteness" needs to be complicated by a deeper reading of the history of "whiteness" in this country. I want to be alert to the assumptions of my own gaze and categorization. Interestingly, later in the class, this particular student berated me in a journal for "forcing" her to read African American women's histories. An interesting dialogue between us about her interpretation of my "choice" of material as "coercion" and her own unease did take place outside the public domain of the classroom, and though we achieved some understanding about the racial politics of "difference," I was somewhat validated by my intuition that her question of my apparel was a hostile one.
6. I have been informally asked why I "choose" to wear the shalwar kameez, but this was the first time that such a question was posed within the context of institutional authority. The consciousness of being inscribed does not influence my daily decisions, so this perception of "choice" was instructive.
7. Often used by expatriate and im/migrant South Asians outside South Asia, desi suggests an identity beyond the specificities of regional, religious, and national roots. I use it because it suggests this hybrid subcontinental sensibility rather than the more limiting and hegemonic descriptor of "Indian" for the particular point I am making here about my own postcolonial, immigrant, and transnational (Nigerian, Indian, and North American) subjectivity. At the same time, I also recognize that its very linguistic roots in the North Indian language, Hindi, contains hegemonic effects. Nevertheless, I seize its vernacular destabilizations while recognizing its limits.
8. For an important discussion of pedagogy as a vehicle through which a critical ethnography "of difference" within the U.S. university's paradigms of multiculturalism take place, see Deborah Wong's "Ethnomusicology and Critical Pedagogy as Cultural Work: Reflections on Teaching and Fieldwork," College Music Symposium 38 (1998): 80-100.
9. Chandra Mohanty and Biddy Martin, "Feminist Politics: What Has Home Got to Do With It?" in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) 191-212.
10. I use this category advisedly, following Grace Poore's detailed discussion about the history of its umbrella-like usage for people from the subcontinent living in the United States. Apart from its possible co-optation by Indians to hegemonize it for contemporary Indian history, it is also problematic for members of a diaspora who have lived in Malaysia, Kenya, and the Caribbean and contend with other frames of race, class, and ethnicity ("The Language of Identity,"22-25).
11. Tandoori chicken is a delicacy of North Indian Mughlai cuisine. It is cooked in a special oven, the tandoor, and has a characteristic reddish glaze.
12. Sonia Shah notes, "For me, the experience of 'otherness,' the formative discrimination in my life, has resulted from culturally different (not necessarily racially different) people thinking they were culturally central: thinking that my house smelled funny, that my mother talked weird, that my habits were strange. They were normal; I wasn't" ("Presenting the Blue Goddess: Toward a National Pan-Asian Feminist Agenda," in Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives, ed. Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey [Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing, 1998], 39).
13. Bharatanatyam is a form of classical South Indian dance.
14. bell hooks, "Theory as Liberatory Practice," in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 59-75.
15. Homa Hoofdar subtly and powerfully presents these contradictions of authority and otherness in "Feminist Anthropology ar d Critical Pedagogy: The Anthropology of Classrooms' Excluded Voices," in Radical Inventions: Identity, Politics, and Difference/s in Educational Praxis, ed. Suzanne de Castell and Mary Bryson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 211-32.
16. By "privileging," I mean the following: In textual substance only a couple of days are spent specifically on Indian women; however, orally, I often use that experience and expertise to compare, contrast, and connect with women in very different cultural and national contexts.
17. I will be using this essay to engage the boundaries of pedagogic dialogue and debate by offering it to subsequent classes for critique and reflection. Responses and reflections from students will be incorporated into another ethnographic staging.
18. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970). See also hooks, Teaching to Transgress.
19. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970). See also hooks, Teaching to Transgress.
20. Merle Woo, "Letter to Ma," in Kirk and Okazawa-Rey, Women's Lives, 64-68.
21. This raises some very important questions around issues of accountability and textual circulation in the production of ethnographic texts. Though many anthropologists have situated their work in circuits of accountablity to communities they have studied, a theoretical and pragmatic critique of language, literacy, class, and imperialism (embedded in the discourse of globalization) and its relationship to anthropological politics is yet to emerge in the center of disciplinary theorizing about ethnographic practice. See Edward Said, "Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocuters," Critical Inquiry 15 (winter 1989): 207-25. In this presentation, my students are located in the structural analog of "natives" of old anthropology, but because this essay will circulate "here," they will access and critique my authorial invocations.
22. Marianne Paget, "Performing the Text," Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 19:1 (1990): 136-55. In using the dramatic form, I am creating an analog to "dance," which Elizabeth Wheatley argues is an expressive form that can subvert the ethnographic gaze ("Dances with Feminists: Truth, Dares and Ethnographic Stares," Women's Studies International Forum 17:4 [1994]: 421-23).
23. Marianne Paget, "Performing the Text," Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 19:1 (1990): 136-55. In using the dramatic form, I am creating an analog to "dance," which Elizabeth Wheatley argues is an expressive form that can subvert the ethnographic gaze ("Dances with Feminists: Truth, Dares and Ethnographic Stares," Women's Studies International Forum 17:4 [1994]: 421-23).
24. This is a film by the New York-based Indian filmmaker, Mira Nair, equally well known for the popular success of Salaam Bombay and Mississippi Masala.
25. For a brilliant and insightful analysis of these events, see Deborah Misar, "The Murder of Navroze Mody: Race, Violence, and the Search for Order," Amerasia Journal 22:2 (1996): 55-76.
26. Bernice Mennis, "Jewish and Working Class," in Women: Images and Realities, ed. Amy Kesselman, Lily McNair, and Nancy Schniedewind (Mountainview, Calif: Mayfield Publishing), 232-35.
27. Sucheta Mazumdar, "Race and Racism: South Asians in the United States," in Frontiers of Asian American Studies: Writing, Research, and Commentary, ed. Gail M. Nomura et al. (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1989), 29. See also Amritjit Singh's extended discussion of Indian racism against African Amercians in, "African Americans and the New Immigrants," in Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality, ed. Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).
28. Sucheta Mazumdar, "Race and Racism: South Asians in the United States," in Frontiers of Asian American Studies: Writing, Research, and Commentary, ed. Gail M. Nomura et al. (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1989), 29. See also Amritjit Singh's extended discussion of Indian racism against African Amercians in, "African Americans and the New Immigrants," in Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality, ed. Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).
29. Misar, "The Murder of Navroze Mody,"57. In the specific events of hate crimes in New Jersey, Misar, quoting a Washington Post article, notes that another gang who targeted Indians, called the Lost Boys, included "one black, one Jew, several Greeks and Italians, three Filipinos, one half Filipino and half Indian, and several Anglos"(A1 Kamen, Washington Post, November 16, 1991, A6). Misar argues that this shatters any binary formulations of white/non-white and Asian-on-Asian violence (62).
30. Misar, "The Murder of Navroze Mody,"57. In the specific events of hate crimes in New Jersey, Misar, quoting a Washington Post article, notes that another gang who targeted Indians, called the Lost Boys, included "one black, one Jew, several Greeks and Italians, three Filipinos, one half Filipino and half Indian, and several Anglos"(A1 Kamen, Washington Post, November 16, 1991, A6). Misar argues that this shatters any binary formulations of white/non-white and Asian-on-Asian violence (62).
31. See Singh's important discussion of these intersections in "African Americans and the New Immigrants," 95, 100-101.
32. Shah argues that conjuntures of racisms, placed as bicultural feminisms, must be linked to create solidarity across Asian women's groups. These new craftings, however, must stretch the binary understandings of racial economies of difference ("Presenting the Blue Goddess," 37-42).
33. See Sucheta Mazumdar and Amritjit Singh for the most comprehensive discussions of the feudal and class mythographies that translate into immigrant and bourgeois models of superiority and racism vis-à-vis other minority communities, but in particular, African American/black communities (Mazumdar, "Race and Racism," 25-38; and Singh, "African Americans and the New Immigrants," 98-103).
34. See Sucheta Mazumdar and Amritjit Singh for the most comprehensive discussions of the feudal and class mythographies that translate into immigrant and bourgeois models of superiority and racism vis-à-vis other minority communities, but in particular, African American/black communities (Mazumdar, "Race and Racism," 25-38; and Singh, "African Americans and the New Immigrants," 98-103).
35. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Defining Genealogies: Feminist Reflections on Being South Asian in North America,"in Kirk and Okazawa-Rey, Women's Lives, 92-97.