Recent cmcs_mrg_gsc items

Second-Generation Indian Americans and the Trope of Arranged Marriage

Tue, 13 Jul 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I was sitting in the Atlanta airport last October, minding my own business and desperately trying to recover from the excesses of four days of celebrating a friend’s wedding, when the middle-aged man sitting next to me struck up a conversation. Upon finding out that I was Indian American, his pleasant smile was replaced with a look of patronizing concern: "So, they’re going to send you back there to get married huh?" he asked knowingly. I immediately went into defense-mode: "We don’t do that anymore," I retorted and our ostensibly innocent conversation came to an abrupt end. As I sat in stony silence across from that poor man, I wondered why I had responded the way I did. After all, I was just coming from the wedding of a bride and groom who met at a regional youth convention that we all know is just a marriage market by another name, and only few months before another friend had gotten married after her parents set the ball in motion. I obviously knew then from my own...

Forging the New Desi Music: Transnational Identity and Musical Syncretism at a South Asian-American Festival

Tue, 6 Jul 2004 00:00:00 +0000

For three days in late April of 2002, Hollywood, California, was home to Artwallah, a multimedia arts festival of the South Asian Diaspora. "Artwallah" essentially means "one who does art," and over 65 artists and performers of South Asian heritage contributed their individual talents and distinctive voices to a collective expression that included dance, film, visual arts, theater, literature, stand-up comedy, and music. In addition to creating a temporary physical space conducive to the sharing of art and experience between participants and the audience, the festival also provided an ideological space that encouraged an inherently "hybrid" style of artistic expression. According to the festival program booklet, this body of work, "though rooted in South Asia, reflects the establishment of the home and the self in new lands." Indeed, the tension between the ancestral homeland and the cultural mainstream of North America was a thread that ran consistently through every medium...

Diasporic Memory is Recherché rather than Recuperation

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 00:00:00 +0000

"'Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narratives of the past.' --Stuart Hall

In this day and age, it is increasingly necessary to recognize the importance of cultural memory in minority rights struggles. Questions of how cultural memory is implicated in the construction of identities and diasporic re-presentations of self must be central to any resistance against dominant cultures’ mis-representation of Other. As immigrants, our memories of home and who and what we were and could become are crucial, especially in the wake of the identity disorienting consequences of a rapidly changing postmodern landscape. In forming our diasporic memories, we must first recognize that memory is not set or carefully preserved in time waiting for its easy retrieval. It is rather a phenomenon that must be researched, constructed, and re-presented. The re-presentation of our cultural memories is significant to our struggle...

"'By being better Samoans you are also becoming better Americans': An Emic Pedagogy of Applied Identity for Samoan Youth in San Francisco"

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 00:00:00 +0000

A Samoan studies professor at the National University of Samoa introduces a new word, fa’asinomaga (identity) in the mid 1990s. A teacher rehearses a skit with a room full of Samoan teens on a chilly summer day in a working class neighborhood of San Francisco in July 2002. A librarian in Carson prepares herself for a Samoan linguistics conference to be held in New Zealand in the winter of 2003. These three events, separated in place and time evoke both the scope and orientations of the Samoan diaspora as well as give a glimpse of an active and ongoing attempt to keep a traditional culture current in face of the culturally homogenizing influence of globalization.

This paper has two parts. In the first part I will briefly explore the Samoan conceptions of culture and identity. In the second part I will look at how one Samoan teacher has applied identity principles in a summer youth program in San Francisco. Ultimately I will argue that this attempted cultural reification...

"Imported Rituals: Zaddiq Veneration in Israel"

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 00:00:00 +0000

"'Rabbi Ifargan is approaching! Please make room to let him pass! Women! Move aside! The Rabbi will not enter the place if you stay so thickly crowded! Please, please…'

The request resonates from the loudspeakers into the forested dark valley in the Galilee region of Israel. Women reluctantly give up their places in front of the big metal fireplace where hundreds of candles are burning. Rabbi Ifargan, a young Jewish orthodox man, clad in a black cloak and a hat comes in followed by a dozen young men. It is slightly after midnight and freezing cold. The 'Tikkun Hazot' ritual is about to begin on a mountain slope by the grave of Zaddiq Yonatan ben Uziel. An elderly man who is holding the microphone starts singing popular religious songs . The crowd joins in loudly. About 300 people are standing on the muddy ground, far away from their warm beds. They are waiting for the Rabbi to start his prayers.

In immigration societies, two different strands constantly...

Qué gusto me da sentir tu voz: Restarting the Dialog that Diaspora Interrupted

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 00:00:00 +0000

"Peace, according to journalist Christopher Hedges (2003), is about the recovery of a narrative, a common narrative.1 This paper is an iteration of that theme. It is a narrative recounting a month-long visit to La Güinera, a neighborhood on the southern outskirts of Havana, Cuba. It is the neighborhood where several of my Cuban relatives live, and where I stayed when I went to Cuba for the first time, in August of 2001.

For the past 44 years, it has served the political interests of privileged groups in both Cuba and the United States to discursively divide the nation into two antagonistic sides: those in favor of the government that came to power in 1959, and those against it. But regardless of whether one answers to these tightly bound subject positions, the pain of absence bleeds profusely, arbitrarily, rhizomatically, into the lived experiences of those who left the island, and those who have stayed. This narrative is a tracing of one such course of history in the...