Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gita Rajan is James Watson Irwin Visiting Professor of Women's Studies at Hamilton College and Associate Professor at Fairfield University. Shailja Sharma is Associate Professor of English at DePaul University.

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New Cosmopolitanisms

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgements.....................................................................................................................................ixContributors.........................................................................................................................................xi1 New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the United States at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma.....................12 The Pakistani Diaspora in North America Iftikhar Dadi.............................................................................................373 Identity and Visibility: Reflections on Museum Displays of South Asian Art Vidya Dehejia..........................................................714 South Asian Religions in the United States: New Contexts and Configurations Karen Leonard.........................................................915 Bollywood Abroad: South Asian Diasporic Cosmopolitanism and Indian Cinema Jigna Desai.............................................................1156 The Psychological Cost of New Cosmopolitanism: Eating Disorders in the Context of Globalization Dana S. Iyer and Nick Haslam......................1387 Theorizing Recognition: South Asian Authors in a Global Milieu Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma......................................................150Index................................................................................................................................................171

Chapter One

GITA RAJAN AND SHAILJA SHARMA

Introduction and Definitions

Institutional markers of a sub-discipline: journals, the naming of -isms or academic categorizations as studies, the rise of model scholars to act as voices of that branch of knowledge have been some traditional, academic ways to broach subjectivities and their constructions. In this collection we explore and discuss the meaning of a new kind of subject construction informed by globalization-the new cosmopolitan subject-and all that it entails in life experiences for South Asians within the nation-space of the United States. For over a decade now, diasporic and postcolonial subject constructions have been studied at the nodes and intersections of newer forces such as globalization and cosmopolitanism. In the social sciences, migration experts guarded their scientific turf through statistical and empirical ethnography, and used theories of nationalism and world systems to explain globalization. In the humanities, this line of questioning has largely been pursued through tropes of cultural identity, porous national borders, and revived fervors of nationalism. Broadly speaking, scholars in both the social sciences and the humanities locate their inquiries into the globalized subject and the processes of globalization, the intersections of technology, travel, and labor, and the privileges/deprivations of citizens within the sphere of cosmopolitan modernity. It is time to reexamine the relationship of diasporas and the globalized, networked world in light of the dialogues presented for a decade almost in Public Culture and Diaspora, and following the rapid applicability of British Cultural Studies to almost any subject, but especially globalization, as indicated by debates around the many articles in Theory, Culture and Society.

As part of that project, our aim is not to examine discrete, bounded, and finite diaspora groups settled in the United States as much as it is to look at what we call New Cosmopolitanism. By using this term, we want to signal its difference from traditional diasporas so as to locate that new cosmopolitanism in a contemporary formation that results from the confluence of globalization (trade, migration, media, money, and culture), but also indicate its affiliations to traditional diasporic formations. We use the adjective "new" to distinguish it from the historical uses of the term cosmopolitanism, even though in some respects the new partakes of the historical meanings, especially in its links to privilege. As Brennan defines it, cosmopolitanism is an ambivalent phenomenon, both in its imperial incarnation, and in its ethical dimension. Its ambivalence is grounded in national-imperial (in Brennan's discussion, often the United States) sentiments whose boundaries complicate the aspiration to world citizenship. However, our argument posits the new cosmopolitan subject as precisely not being grounded in a nation-state or in a class (intellectual or working class). She instead occupies a range of fluid subject positions, which can be trans-class, trans-local with competing value systems. For example, a new cosmopolitan subject could be a gay South Asian-American activist, a store owner, or a filmmaker, all enacting a range of new and changing subject positions. Consequently, we want to examine the ground that South Asians inhabit, ranging from the older immigrants to the newer ones, across first, second, and third generation populations whose life styles and life choices reveal an interesting blend of diasporic and cosmopolitan traits.

Theorists of traditional diasporas like Robin Cohen, Khachig Tllyan, and Safran, have posited diasporas as stable, fixed populations. Though consisting of people displaced through choice, violence, trade, or imperialism, they nevertheless are bounded both in space (at a distance from their homeland), and through their bipolar relationships to the homeland. However, we define new cosmopolitans as people who blur the edges of home and abroad by continuously moving physically, culturally, and socially, and by selectively using globalized forms of travel, communication, languages, and technology to position themselves in motion between at least two homes, sometimes even through dual forms of citizenship, but always in multiple locations (through travel, or through cultural, racial, or linguistic modalities). It is these new forms of shifting choices and complex relationships that emerge from what were earlier "knowable" as diasporas that we call new cosmopolitanism. In a kind of shorthand, one could call them diasporas in motion, where motion could be physical, cultural, ideological; motion, moreover of people or by capital, technology, media forms, or culture. It is necessary to repeat, but also mark entities such as technology, media, and culture, for example, because these are the momentary and fragmentary locations that people inhabit in our rapidly globalizing world. New cosmopolitanism thus creates and defines itself by occupying in-between spaces of identity, culture, and communication, spurning fissures both along the lines of ethnic nationalism as well as the old assimilative logic of host cultures. One way of understanding this class of people may be through the metaphor popularized by Manuel Castells of the "network" that describes the newest form of globalization (Castells 1996).

These networks are mutable and linked to contemporary manifestations of globalization, constructed in the shifting space between older definitions of diaspora and traditional cosmopolitanism. Our present inquiry into this class of people called new cosmopolitans rests upon the work of immigration historians and cultural critics (Appadurai, Robertson, Rouse, Scholte, and Bauman). In addition to Roger Rouse's study of Mexican...