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The world in the classroom: Women teaching diaspora

In the latest in our series of annual reports on women and feminism in the academy, published every February, we look at a phenomenon that has literally changed the face of many countries in the last thirty years. For a variety of reasons - many of them explored in the essays and interviews we present inside - the worldwide movement of populations from the third world to the first, the South to the North, and especially from East and South Asia, has accelerated dramatically. And in a departure from traditional patterns, in the new diasporas of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, women as well as men are migrating to new homes and taking up jobs there - ranging from sex work and domestic labor to positions in Silicon Valley and academia. We asked a range of women teaching in the many fields grouped under the common heading of “Diaspora Studies,” and focusing in particular on movements to and from South and East Asia, to tell us about the work they do and the students they teach.

A change in US immigration law introduced in 1965 has had an unexpectedly widespread and long-term impact on the numbers of women and men arriving from South and East Asia. Now a small but significant, and growing, number of those women (and their children) are teaching in colleges and universities around the country, often in Asian Studies and Ethnic Studies programs, in subjects ranging from literature to sociology, women’s studies to economics. And more and more of their students are the children of fellow-immigrants, Asian Americans whose relation to the countries of their parents is complex and often conflicted.

This special issue and a companion issue, "Women Writing the Diaspora," to be published in July 2002, are funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to those who contributed to it, we would like to thank Meena Alexander of Hunter College, Shirley Geok-lin Lim of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Karin Aguilar-San Juan of Macalester College for their invaluable help in creating this issue.

Moving target
The study of diaspora opens up a multitude of paradoxes, shifting identities and intellectual challenges.

By Sonita Sarker

DIASPORA AS A FIELD OF STUDY, as a discourse, and even as methodology, appears to have arrived. There are centers of Diaspora Studies at Tulane University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of South Florida, Michigan State, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Bryn Mawr College, the Barnard Project on Migration and Diaspora, to mention only a few; journals like Diaspora: Journal of Transnational Studies to name only one; music publishing companies such as Diaspora Connections; and numerous websites. This special section could be said to function as an acknowledgment of the depth and breadth of its force in academia.

I'd like, however, to stop to think why we read, write and teach "the diaspora" and what that indicates about our status and profession. For many of us, working in "diaspora studies" overlaps with our research in race, ethnicity, public policy and gender studies; for still others, it invokes our identities as diasporic transplants/travelers; for some of us, it does both of these at once.

Academic institutions function within local, national, or global marketplaces (depending upon scope and scale) that obey sociopolitical and economic imperatives. In other words, the sustenance and growth of our intellectual endeavors exist symbiotically with the material impact of diasporic communities upon local societies, part of which is a demand placed on institutions by patrons (who endow programs) and students (who support courses).(1) When do "diaspora studies" come about? When there is the impact of a critical mass (or mass of funding) on economic, political, social and cultural machineries.

By institutionalizing diaspora studies, we affirm our intellectual affiliations, which are often emotional ones as well. We also legitimize diaspora as an experience that should be made visible, and we should be aware of this power. For feminist diasporic studies in particular, theoretical discussions form the other face of lived realities. This relationship between theory and practice has been hotly debated in women's/feminist studies in general, but is moot in this context if we concede the link between the various histories of diasporas and their present places in institutions of knowledge.

Speaking of origins, an unavoidable topic in diaspora studies, what is the source of the word? Diaspora (with an upper-case D) was first used to refer to the dispersal of Jewish communities from Palestine following the Babylonians' conquest in the sixth century BCE, and again following the Romans' destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. It is often assumed that "diaspora studies" refers either to these migrations or to those from the "Third World" to the "West." Late-colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial Anglophone diasporas (African, Caribbean and South Asian Indian), my fields of study, should be contextualized, rather, in relation to intra-Asian diasporas (Chinese and Indians to Southeast Asia and vice versa), to that of South Asians to the Middle East (especially the Gulf States), Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana and the Caribbean, as much as to other diasporas in the direction of the ex-colonial and neo-colonial "West."(2)

Diasporas are not only varied but stem from historically contingent circumstances: working-class Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi diasporas to Italy and Germany came about differently from middle- and merchant-class Indian diasporas to the US and Canada. Awareness of this fact serves to make diaspora studies interdisciplinary. While my primary disciplinary field is literature, textual analyses of diasporic women writers--as in the course I teach on "Twentieth-century Anglophone Women Writers: India and its Diaspora"--requires an understanding of the factors influencing South Asian diaspora. In this context, literary productions became sociocultural and political manifestations of (post)modernity, embedded in three centuries of dislocation of indentured labor, (neo)colonial regimes of political exile and relatively more recent waves of legal as well as illegal immigration that serve public and private sectors of technology, farming, clothing industries, domestic labor and, yes, academia.

The words "transnational" and "migration," appearing in the same frame as "diaspora" (as they do in the name of the journal and one of the centers I named earlier), can be seen as inextricable but subject to qualification. As the subtitle of my course, "India and its Diaspora," demonstrates, there are issues not only of origin and belonging, of a duality of identity at the least (of the "here" and the "back home"), but of what kinds of transnational identities are generated through migration. South Asian identities range from the cosmopolitan corporate or intellectual strata fueled by mobile capital, which include the powerful patriarchies that Aihwa Ong terms "flexible citizens,"(3) to the non-citizen-like strata of sweatshop workers, conscripted servanthood and refugee camp-dwellers. Where would one place the current crisis of refugees in Pakistan and Australia in the generations of Afghani diaspora, or the "transnational migrations" of Dalit ("untouchable") peoples in the Indian diaspora? Feminist litterateurs and artists in many media, individuals and civic groups have contributed greatly to the political advocacy of the rights of South Asians "here" and "back home," by creating cross-class and cross-ethnic transnational solidarities, from Cornelia Sorabji, a writer and social worker in the early part of the twentieth century, to Asha for Education, a transnational group in the present decade.

Diaspora until when? Diasporas occur as much across time as across space, for they are, like their motivations, continual but changing processes of the scattering of peoples. They do not automatically exclude "assimilation" or "resettlement." This is precisely where, for example, Asian diasporic studies find a common ground with Asian American studies. Both fields, distinct as they may be, call into question exclusive nation-state-based identities--Indian or Indian-American, to take the prevalent example. The relationship of Indians who reside in India to their counterparts abroad or in-between complicates the issues of citizenship and belonging. Is "diaspora" synonymous with inevitable minoritization (racial/ethnic intersecting with gender and sexual) in the places of assimilation or resettlement, of a kind that populations "back home" do not face? The partial "yes" in answer to this question has, at least, fueled struggles for the democratization of political, social and economic processes in the countries of resettlement.

FINDING THE ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS like these helps explain non-residents' investment in the countries of their origin, even as generations of diasporans become citizens of the new land. Take, for example, the involvement of diasporic Indians in land ownership, economic ventures and politics in India, the role of the Tamil diaspora for the Tamil nationalist movement in Sri Lanka, or the struggle of the Nepali diaspora in fluctuating political conditions in Nepal. On a different but equally significant political note, note the steady numbers of arranged marriages facilitated by the Internet, both within diasporic communities and of diasporans with women or men from the countries of "origin." This is political because there is an implicit belief that cultural practices of membership supersede the changes across time and space diaspora purportedly has wrought.

In the field of literature, diasporic studies raise the question of whether writers who live in India should be included in the spectrum of relationships that cross regional and national borders and taught in courses like my own. In other words, why should diasporic literatures (or sociological or political studies, for that matter) exclude the "country of origin" if the relations are as complex as those I have outlined above?

To return to a point I made at the outset that bears upon investment and accountability: some teachers and students are led to diasporic studies by their intellectual interests, others by personal experience, some by both. For a student or teacher from a local or national community that does not avow any diasporic history, how does a course such as "Twentieth-century Anglophone Women Writers: India and its Diaspora" appear? Does it imply that their local communities do not "move," or can one slide from related concepts such as "migratory" communities to "diasporic" ones in order to make a connection between them? Does the "international" student or the first-generation student of a recent diaspora feel closer to the subject at hand? I ask these questions constantly of my classes on diasporic literature (but not only those), and get different answers every time.

It would perhaps be fruitful for us, as students and scholars, to juxtapose the textual and other practices of those who consider themselves "native" with those of the "newly-arrived"-to examine in our courses not just how the immigrant reacts to the new location, but what the "natives" think and say about the foreigner in their midst. By looking only at what the immigrant or the newly arrived say and do, we ghettoize their experience and reify the Us-and-Them opposition yet again. This new direction would serve to underscore the acknowledgment that diversity and difference are not brought by "them" but are constituted in the very encounter of the native with the new, and more importantly, that of the self with its own minoritized other (the poor, the disabled, the sexually-tabooed, etc.). These questions and methods should be part of the metatext of such a course, so that participating in it becomes a catalyst of self-reflection, not just the acquisition of a ready-made package of the exotic "other," to be bought and consumed.

1. On this relationship between academics and socioeconomic imperatives, see Gayatri Spivak, "Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World," in Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere, edited by Amitava Kumar (New York University Press, 1997), 87-116, and Theory as Resistance, by Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton (Guilford Press, 1993).

2. See the introduction to my co-edited book Trans-Status Subjects: Genders in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia (forthcoming from Duke University Press, 2002).

3. See Aihwa Ong's Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Duke University Press, 1999).

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Think globally, teach locally
Kamala Kempadoo and Lisa Sun-Hee Park trace multiple connections between their work and their lives

KAMALA KEMPADOO AND LISA SUN-HEE PARK are colleagues in Women's Studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder and also teach, respectively, in the Sociology and Ethnic Studies Programs. The Women's Review asked them to talk about the interconnections between their lives and their work as teachers and scholars.

KK: For the past decade my research has been on the global sex trade, though my broader interests are the global intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality, and transnational and postcolonial movements of labor. My interest draws very much from my own personal background and experience. I was born in Britain, of Indo- and Afro-Guyanese descent. My father is from a family of indentured workers from South India who were taken to Guyana in the nineteenth century to work on the sugar plantations, and my mother a descendant of African slaves and European settlers. My parents migrated to England in the early fifties, and I have been a migrant for most of my life, living and working in Britain, various parts of the English and Dutch-speaking Caribbean, the Netherlands and, more recently the US. I consider myself a part of both the Asian and the African diasporas, and this family history and experience of colonialism, diaspora-ization and migration has greatly informed my interest in larger global processes.

I first became interested in the global sex trade when I was in Amsterdam in the 1980s: Living in the middle of the red-light district, I couldn't help but notice an overrepresentation of women of color--women from the Philippines, Thailand, the Dominican Republic and Colombia in particular--behind the windows, on the streets, in the bars, at the massage parlors and nightclubs. At that time I was studying sociology and doing graduate work at the University of Amsterdam on black women's participation in the Dutch labor market, and I was also active in the black and migrant women's movement there. These strands all came together and made me curious about what was happening in the global sex trade for women from so-called developing countries.

LSP: My research areas revolve around immigrant labor, particularly immigrant women's labor, health and family. One topic I'm spending quite a bit of time on is immigrant women workers in the high-tech industry of Silicon Valley. I focus on their labor and their health and the environmental conditions of a workplace where so many women are concentrated. I'm talking specifically about the production line, manufacturing rather than the design or engineering side of Silicon Valley. Those women workers have been largely ignored, and studying them brings questions about the rights of citizenship, activism, resistance as factory workers to the forefront.

In some ways I suppose I'm a little selfish--I feel like sometimes I'm studying myself and my family; on the other hand I do feel there is something larger that has not been explored, and that I can make at least a little contribution to it. I am what's considered the 1.5 generation--I was born in South Korea but I grew up largely in the United States. When my family came to California, my mother went immediately into the electronics industry. But my father, who has a graduate degree in chemical engineering, could not find a job to save his life when we first came here. The electronics industry, the semi-conductor industry, was not hiring men; they wanted women who had no experience working in that industry. I found that really interesting even at a very young age--how strange that my father had all these degrees and yet he had a very difficult time being hired, while my mother, with no experience at all, was immediately hired, and so were all my aunts. I later learned that that's how the industry is deliberately constructed: these inexperienced immigrant women are seen as docile, as malleable. Perceptions based on racism and sexism and classism contribute to create that labor force. As I grew up in this environment, this experience stayed with me, to the point that when I started my graduate work, I went back to it.

KK: Lisa, was your family affected by the shifting policies in the US around immigration?

LSP: Oh, absolutely. You can't stress enough how much national and perhaps also international legislation affects people individually on an everyday basis. Many of the people that I study, as well as my own family, are examples of this. In 1965 there was a very important change in immigration law [the Hart-Cellar Act, which introduced preferential admission for relatives of US citizens and people with needed professional skills]. My parents came here in 1977 as a direct effect of that door opening. But as much as we'd like to describe the 1965 legislation as an open-door policy, in fact it wasn't. Instead of restrictions based on nation of origin, it was class-based, the assumption being that it would attract the better kind of migrants. But they really underestimated the family reunification clause in the 1965 law. They thought, less than one percent of the population of the United States are Asian--how many family members could they have? Well, we have a lot of family. But the primary criterion for selection was based on the economic needs, or perceived economic needs, of the US.

KK: I see very similar patterns in Europe. Up to the 1970s, migration into Europe was shaped by colonial relations, but also by very specific labor market needs. So, for example, South Asians were recruited to the British Midlands to work in the manufacturing sector there, and North Africans were drawn into the steel industry in Holland. But with the expansion and consolidation of the European Union, the borders became more closed to non-European citizens, with a direct effect on the migration of people from Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean. It has had a huge impact on the movement of Third World women into sex work, because they could no longer easily enter legally and work in the formal sectors.

To give you an example of how recent laws have not really changed this situation: the Netherlands legalized prostitution in 2000, but only for European citizens; people from the Central and East European countries and the newly independent states may apply to work in the sex industry as self-employed entrepreneurs. In other words, European women may work legally now in brothels or red-light districts, but women who are still arriving from elsewhere are being pushed into the informal, illegal sector or into underground work within the legalized sex sector. Immigration and labor laws have managed over the past twenty or so years to keep many Third World women in Europe doing informal, illegal work.

LSP: It is interesting that within the dialogue about globalization, there is a lot of talk about the wiping out of the informal market, the sense that with the breaking down of borders of all kinds there would be no need for an informal or entrepreneurial economy. But that hasn't happened. Much as we like to talk about the new global economy, in fact we see a lot of the same patterns as before, partly because of the continued need for reserve labor and cheap labor.

KK: In the last twenty years we've also seen a growing demand in the leisure and service sectors in the industrialized parts of the world, particularly North America and Western Europe, which has really distorted labor needs and migration flows. In the case of the global sex trade, the growing wealth that people have in the North has given rise to a great explosion in demand for sexualized services, and right now cheap labor in that sector is being drawn especially from developing countries. As a result of IMF and World Bank policies, many of the social infrastructures, educational programs, social programs, the social safety nets that were being put in place in developing countries, have been broken down, and this has impacted women most heavily. When we look at the options women have today in these countries, in particular women with few skills or little education, they're very, very limited. We're still hearing reports of women having to work twelve to fourteen hours a day in countries like Bangladesh and earning the equivalent of twenty dollars US a month. When offers are made to women in these conditions to take up work abroad, to travel to the wealthy countries, to do some kind of domestic or entertainment work, it sounds, of course, very attractive. My interest is in understanding how women are trying to make sense of these options. They're not so much victims, they're trying to find their way in this increasingly unequal, globalized world. They often take the route of migration to a new country, and perhaps end up in the sex trade where, because of the criminalized status of sex work, they are exposed to abuse, horrendous working conditions, extortions and violence. These are the kind of issues that we need to continue to address; there's a lot that's not known about what's going on in the sex trade.

LSP: You're right: the choices are so limited. We see, for instance, electronics corporations coming to Asia and now the Caribbean and Latin America. They come in with promises of economic improvement that will move these countries into some kind of self-sufficiency, and they promise similar things to women too. Women in these countries are very attractive to them: first and foremost, they're cheaper, and they're seen as very easy to manipulate and, quite frankly, not very bright. Many times these corporations assume that people don't know when they're being screwed--though of course people know when they're not being treated properly. There's very little loyalty to the new sites or countries that they set up in, and yet they demand so much loyalty from the women workers. It's a very exploitative relationship, obviously, but the women have to deal with it, and sometimes they do that by justifying their existence as part of the corporation they work for. We hear them talk about their place as mothers and what they need to do in order to survive and to help the family and to raise their children, and one of the very limited options they have to help them do that, of course, is sex work.

KK: I mentioned the legalization of the sex industry that's happening in Europe, which protects the rights of a certain sector of the world's population but not of all women. If we look at the new UN anti-trafficking protocol, what is very discouraging is that it's not really addressing the causes of the problems--women's oppression, economic inequalities internationally, or the growing demand for sex in the North by men and increasingly by women. It's primarily concerned with rescuing victims, preferably "innocent" victims, punishing the sending countries like Thailand or India for allowing these women to enter into the sex trade, and putting a lot of pressure on so-called traffickers, who are usually identified as men of third world or developing countries. So what we're seeing is a displacement of blame onto poor nations and an attempt to "rescue" poor women from their men. The protocol doesn't take responsibility for, or address, the development of sex industries here in the North or the large demand for these cheap, exotic women.

LSP: There are a lot of reasons why we don't want to get at some real solutions here--the responsibility lies so much with those who have the power to define these structures and maintain them. Certainly we see that happening within the United States, for instance in immigration legislation as well as welfare legislation having to do with immigrants. Corporations are becoming more and more powerful in determining national immigration policy, for example through the use of H-1B visas [visas issued for a limited period to college-educated professionals in a "specialty occupation" with a firm job offer in the US]. The high-tech industry has been very effective in defining its particular needs as being of national concern or national need. The assumption is that what's good for a corporation or an industry is good for the nation--meaning that what's good for a corporation will increase the flow of capital, and that that is somehow synonymous with upholding democracy.

Even within the feminist movement we have this notion about what the United States is and what we can do--we want to go out and help the victims, "those poor women," in an extremely condescending and imperialistic way. Immigrants fulfil an important ideological need in the US, in that they reinforce the belief in democracy over and over again. Despite the reality of legislation like the H-1B visa, which is racist and certainly classist, immigrants in fact help to maintain the American dream, the image of America as the land of opportunity, even though it's only the land of opportunity for certain people and as long as it's convenient for their potential employers.

KK: I'd like to take up some of Lisa's comments with reference to our teaching about these issues. Lisa brings up how important it is to think critically about the multinational role of the US, including imperialist attitudes that are embedded in some North American feminism. This is a dimension that we bring into our classes, which is an enormous challenge, here at the University of Colorado. It's quite a homogeneous university, we have little diversity, and it's difficult to teach a population of students who have little sense of their own position in relationship to the world. It's like trying to teach men about their own relationship to patriarchy. It can be frustrating, but it's something that we both do in our classes.

LSP: I've learned in the few years that I've been teaching that it's not just about conveying information. Sometimes the information we present is something that these students have never given a second--or a first--thought to, ever. It's completely new to them, and often entirely contradictory to their world view, which they can find very upsetting. So you can't simply present something and have the factual basis to back it up, as you might if you were writing an article. When students with privilege, whether that be class, or race, or gender, feel tested, they test back, and they're in your face about it. And you have to convince them or else the class doesn't keep going.

For instance, I teach a class called "Immigrant Women in the Global Economy." I had to change the syllabus quite a bit after my first attempt at it, because there was such anger within the classroom. There was constant questioning of my patriotism and my place within the United States, and of course the familiar, "if you don't like it, get out" comments. Students feel they have the authority to say that to me. Many of these students have never seen a person who looks like me in a place of authority. Perhaps as their gardener or their maid, but not as their professor, or even their high-school teacher. I realized that one of the things I had to change was the presentation of my self. I changed, for instance, the way I dress--so now I only wear pants. I also change the way I present information, using more overheads, having graphs, citing the sources that I derive my material from. I know I'm playing into certain expectations and racial and sexist assumptions about legitimate information; there's less questioning of the information that I present if I document it as coming from a book written by a man, for instance.

KK: What helps us are some of the exchanges we've been having on our campus in cross-disciplinary groups, reading groups, gatherings of persons like ourselves who are doing research and work on globalization, transnational processes, women of color and immigration issues. In 1999, we organized a public forum, which we called "The 'Absence' of Empire in Intellectual Life in the US Academy: Women of Color Teaching Global Studies at CU-Boulder," with colleagues from women's studies, geography, history, ethnic studies, English and Comp Lit, to talk with each other about how we addressed questions of imperialism and colonialism in our classes. That kind of initiative was very successful, partly because it also brought these issues that we deal with into a more public arena, and made us all a little bit more aware of some of the struggles that we face on a day-to-day basis at this university.

LSP: One of the things that I've learned from my colleagues here is that these problems in the classroom have happened before and will happen again. Dealing with them has got to be a constant effort on all of our parts. It takes a lot of energy and it takes a lot of time. When I teach the course on the global economy, I always end up partway through saying to myself, "Why did I do this to myself again? What is wrong with me? I can't take it, it's just too much." And then I teach it again. To be able to teach what I'm researching is so important to my intellectual growth--to present it to students, to show the level of excitement and curiosity that I experience and that I would like my students to see and experience too. At the same time, when I get frustrated and I see such resistance and sometimes outright anger, which is scary, I think, "What have I done?" It's still worth it, so I keep doing it. But sometimes I want to kick myself in the pants for doing it. <@rdingbat>f

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The aesthetics of dislocation
Writing the hybrid lives of South Asian Americans

By Ketu H. Katrak

THE LIVED REALITY OF RELOCATIONS and dislocations of vast populations makes the phenomenon of diaspora a commonplace in our time. In this essay, I contend that in constituting diasporic identities and communities, it is critical to include the categories of race, ethnicity and nation, along with gender, class, religion and language.

A strikingly troubling embrace of American nationality is expressed in a recent article by Indian American writer Bharati Mukherjee. In "Two Ways to Belong in America," she writes: "This is a tale of two sisters from Calcutta, Mira and Bharati, who have lived in the United States for some 35 years, but who find themselves on different sides in the current debate over the status of immigrants. I am an American citizen and she is not... She is here to maintain an identity, not to transform it... The price that the immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile avoids, is the trauma of self-transformation." (New York Times, September 22, 1996).

Mukherjee embraces a monolithic American-ness, irrespective of race and class. She gets a lot of mileage from comparing her negative experiences in Canada to the more "immigrant-friendly" US. In the Preface to her collection of stories, Darkness, she notes: "Indianness is now a metaphor, a particular way of partially comprehending the world. Though the characters in these stories are or were 'Indian', I see most of these as stories of broken identities and discarded languages and the will to bond oneself to a new community against the ever-present fear of failure and betrayal." Mukherjee embraces being "American," not Indian and American, not hyphenated. Further, she wants to be recognized as "an American writer" in the tradition of American writers.

Another Indian American writer, Meena Alexander, allies herself with the voices of other minority writers, particularly Asian Americans, and in my view takes a more nuanced and thoughtful stance about identity than Mukherjee's. She does not deny her past, but links her present and past history as a South Asian American to that of other ethnic groups in the US: "The present for me is the present of 'multiple anchorages'," she notes in her perceptive essay, "Is There an Asian American Aesthetic?" "It is these multiple anchorages that an ethnicity of Asian American provides for me, learning from Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, African Americans, Indian Americans, and everyone jostling, shifting and sliding the symbols that come out of my own mind."(1) In the same essay, she delineates an "aesthetics of dislocation" as one component of an Asian American aesthetic; "the other is that we have all come under the sign of America. In India, no one would ask me if I were Asian American or Asian. Here we are part of a minority, and the vision of being 'unselved' comes into our consciousness. It is from this consciousness that I create my work of art."

AMONG THE POST-1965, GENERALLY ASIA-BORN generation of immigrants who embark on the psychological and socio-cultural journey of becoming "American" and, more specifically, adopting an Asian American identity, Jhumpa Lahiri's collection of stories presents a remarkable vision that I term "ethno-global," one that certainly transcends narrow nationalism, but that celebrates an ethnic heritage along with evoking an exemplary universalist humanism.

In the title story of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies, the Das family return to India from the US; as they cross national borders they are forced to recognize their own dual identities--more American in clothing, speech, body language than Indian, though ethnically marked.

Indian Americans are also described in India as NRIs--Non-Resident Indians. Although India does not allow dual nationality, this is a way to retain close emotional ties; hence, even as American citizens, they are still identified as "Indian," albeit "non-resident"--a form of "flexible citizenship," to borrow Aihwa Ong's phrase. As Inderpal Grewal notes, the Indian government nurtures the ties to home since they want to entice NRI financial investments to India; this NRI population is not interested in forming coalitions with other people of color in the US, and most are uncritical of the US "ideology of 'democracy' and 'freedom.'"(2)

The Das family embark with cameras on a journey to see the famous Sun Temple at Konarack. They want to learn from the ethnic heritage that is not part of their everyday geography in the US. Lahiri sensitively captures the image of this native-returned-as-tourist in the portrayal of Mrs. Das, whose interest in the local guide/driver, Mr. Kapasi, is interpreted quite differently by the foreign-returned and by the native. The driver, Mr. Kapasi, who works as a doctor's assistant, one who describes the various maladies of patients to the doctor to help him to prescribe medicines, is called "the interpreter of maladies." He regards this as "a job like any other"; to Mrs. Das it is "so romantic" and "full of responsibility." He finds "nothing noble in interpreting peoples' maladies." He works with the doctor in "a stale little infirmary where Mr. Kapasi's smartly tailored clothes clung to him in the heat, in spite of the blackened blades of a ceiling fan churning over their heads."

Lahiri's representations, on one level, acknowledge the ethnic and national in descriptions of Mr. Kapasi and his modest work, as well as in Mrs. Das' return nativism. She can romanticize his job and make it sound grander than it is from her outsider perspective. Lahiri recreates national identity via ethnicized codes of communication, both spoken and unspoken; culturally defined signals are misinterpreted by Mr. Kapasi, who regards Mrs. Das as both native and US-stamped. Of course, he does not have her privileges of travel, or of picking and choosing from different cultures--a kind of global entitlement that she and her family have acquired by living in the US.

When Mrs. Das casually asks for Mr. Kapasi's address--something that tourists do when they take photographs and "promise" to send them back--he over-interprets that to signify real interest in him and his work. Lahiri subtly weaves in the sexual attraction that he experiences. "He began to check his reflection in the rear-view mirror as he drove, feeling grateful that he had chosen the gray suit that morning and not the brown one... He glanced at the strawberry between her breasts, and the golden brown hollow in her throat... He could smell a scent on her skin, like a mixture of whiskey and rosewater. He worried suddenly that she could smell his perspiration."

He fantasizes that since she has asked for his address, they would correspond regularly and he would tell her many more stories of the maladies that he interpreted. He is already anticipating the letter as he calculates how long it would take to get one after their return to the US. "In its own way, this correspondence would fulfill his dream, of serving as an interpreter between nations." He dreams of crossing national boundaries in his imagination, serving as a kind of cultural ambassador representing his nation to the US-bred and Indian-looking Mrs. Das.

As he continues to fantasize and the sexual innuendoes mushroom, and as the others wander off, Mrs. Das makes a startling revelation: that her son's father is not Mr. Das. Mr. Kapasi is shocked, but tries to keep his composure. Why tell him? She had kept this secret for eight years, and was hoping that his job as an interpreter of maladies would help her to feel better, that he would be able to suggest a remedy. Perhaps one reason for this revelation is that Mrs. Das is looking for a spiritual, mystical India with healing powers, and sees the interpreter as a vehicle sent to her for that purpose.(3)

Lahiri resolves the story beautifully. The mother's guilt and pain is somehow transferred to the innocent son, who has wandered off alone and is attacked by a pack of monkeys. He needs to be carried back to the car bleeding and crying. As Mrs. Das tries to comfort him and reaches into her bag, the piece of paper on which she had scribbled Mr. Kapasi's address floats away. Her revelation of sexual infidelity to someone who shares her ethnicity but is divided from her in every other way, especially in class privilege, is a reminder that the gap dividing them is more significant than their common ethnicity.

SOME STORIES IN THE COLLECTION unfold in the US, others travel back to India through their characters' imaginations and histories, others are set in India with the ever-present West looming in the wings. There are women who have affairs, men who leave their wives, women who chose careers over family, non-traditional women and men. Lahiri's characters demonstrate the diversity of the South Asian American community with their various languages, religions and regional food cultures. Their daily lives in this diasporic location unfold as they struggle and dream, argue and entertain. These portrayals broaden the representations of Indian Americans, abandoning any fixed notion of "great" Indian culture.

In another Lahiri story, "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine," the birth of Bangladesh and the history of the Partition of India and Pakistan are seen from ten-year-old Lilia's point of view. For the US-born child, this history is foreign. While her father is frustrated about what his daughter learns "about the world" in school, her assimilated mother is defensive: "Lilia has plenty to learn at school. We live here now, she was born here." Her father categorically says of Partition "We were sliced up," the passive voice indicating that the majority of the population had no say over this traumatic event. Lahiri sets the story during the struggle for Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan. Dacca-based Mr. Pirzada, visiting the US, is suddenly cut off by the war from news about his wife and seven daughters at home. The daily news is hardly adequate and full of stereotypes disconnected from people's actual lives.

Mr. Pirzada seems to be living in limbo, his watch set eleven hours ahead to reflect the local time in Dacca. With a child's sensitivity, Lilia tunes into his anxiety about the fate of his family, and shares the daily ritual of meals carefully prepared by her Bengali mother (who remains tied to homeland tastes and uses the precise kind of mustard oil needed for the fish, or the particular kinds of chilli peppers). However, "no one at school talked about the war followed so faithfully in my living room. We continued to study the American Revolution and learned about the injustices of taxation without representation and memorized passages from the Declaration of Independence." Lilia discovers what Meena Alexander describes accurately as the burden "of carrying our histories within us since they are not visible in the world around us."

At school, when Lilia takes the initiative to look up a book on Pakistan she is reprimanded: "Is this book a part of your report, Lilia?... Then I see no reason to consult it." The reality at home is radically different, as the family tries to be supportive of Mr. Pirzada, awaiting "the birth of a nation on the other side of the world." The whole drama unfolding in the subcontinent--the war for independence, poets and intellectuals killed, refugees flooding into India, and then war declared between India and Pakistan backed by the two super-powers--leaves most Americans untouched. Much of this history remains "a remote mystery with haphazard clues" for the young child who feels the anxiety that her parents share with Mr. Pirzada. "Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, single silence, and a single fear." At last Mr. Pirzada is able to return to Dacca and reunite with his family. A new nation is created, and new maps must be created, as the local people re-draw the old colonially imposed boundary. As Lilia recalls: "Every now and then I studied the map above my father's desk and pictured Mr. Pirzada on that small patch of yellow, perspiring heavily I imagined in one of his suits, searching for his family. Of course, the map was outdated by then."

Lahiri's stories capture the humanity of ordinary people, struggling with "traditions," arranged marriage, food preparation, helping the destitute, people who take diasporic leaps to create new lives even as they keep hold on the small details of their culture--eating with fingers, enjoying a specific regional pickle, speaking native languages, being dutiful. While Lahiri's characters remain self-consciously aware of their ethnicity, they participate in this US culture through their intimate relationships, married, single, raising children, driving that extra mile to get an absolutely necessary ingredient for a favorite recipe. Even as their ethnicity as South Asian Americans is performed in daily life, they work towards a hybrid realization of their subjectivity as Asians and as Americans.

LANGUAGE USES ARE A SIGNIFICANT PART of diasporic experience. In a poem entitled "Language," Amita Vasudeva recreates the levels of ignorance about Asian languages and cultures in US society: "Can you speak Mexican... No I am from India... Can you speak Hindu?" Such ignorance compounds a second generation's conflict about learning mother-tongues that are not heard in mainstream culture. Yet those languages, especially those mother-tongues, cling to them, stuck almost like a second skin that cannot be shed.

In Chitra Divakaruni's short story "Leaving Yuba City,"(4) a second-generation daughter leaves home. The cultural gulf between daughter and parents is so wide that she has to make an escape in the middle of the night, and has to face the question: in which language would she leave a note to her parents? "The words, the language. How can she write in English to her parents who have never spoken to her in anything but Punjabi, who will have to have someone translate the lines and curves, the bewildering black slashes she has left behind?" She hopes that later, as she learns to make her own space in the world, she will be able to communicate more openly with her parents: "Maybe the words will come to her... halting but clear, in the language of her parents, the language that she carries with her, for it is hers too, no matter where she goes."

In another Divakaruni story, "Yuba City School," a mother struggles with the knowledge that her son is being racially harassed in school. The mother feels helpless because she is not fluent enough in English to argue with the teacher: "My few English phrases," she thinks. "She [the teacher] will pluck them from me, nail shut my lips." Through a few deft phrases, Divakaruni evokes fear and cultural impasse.

Longing for homes left behind may be intense for first-generation immigrants who seek a community to belong to. In becoming diasporic, we need to keep in mind the political parameters of home, community and nation, as analyzed usefully in Chandra Mohanty's essay, "Defining Genealogies: Feminist Reflections on being South Asian in North America":

What is home? The place I was born? Where I grew up? Where I live and work as an adult? Where I locate my community--my people? Who are "my people"? Is home a geographical space, an historical space, an emotional sensory space? Home is always so crucial to immigrants and migrants... I am convinced that this question--how one understands and defines home--is a profoundly political one... Political solidarity and a sense of family could be melded together imaginatively to create a strategic space I could call "home."(5)

Among South Asian American writers who portray ethnicity and nation, indeed achieve that ethno-global vision as Lahiri does, let me conclude with and dedicate my essay to a masterful poet, Agha Shahid Ali, whose recent death leaves a profound gap in the South Asian American literary tradition. His deep and abiding love for his homeland of Kashmir gave the world ways of imaginatively "finding" home while living away from it. Ethnically grounded and simultaneously embracing a vast humanity, the persona in the opening poem of the volume The Half-Inch Himalayas, startlingly touches his home in a picture postcard. The persona can be both here and there through the power of the imagination and through language.(6) "Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox/ My home a neat four by six inches./ I always loved neatness. Now I hold/ The half-inch Himalayas in my hand./ This is home. And this is the closest/ I'll ever come to home."

1. Meena Alexander, "Is There an Asian American Aesthetic?" in SAMAR (South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection), Winter 1992, I, 1, 26-27.
2. Inderpal Grewal, "Reading and Writing the South Asian Diaspora: Feminism and Nationalism in North America," in Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora (Aunt Lute Books, 1993), 226-236.
3. I am grateful to Beheroze Shroff for sharing this insight with me.
4. Chitra Divakaruni, "Leaving Yuba City" in Our Feet Walk the Sky, 38-40.
5. Chandra Mohanty, "Defining Genealogies: Feminist Reflections on Being South Asian in North America," in Our Feet Walk the Sky, 351-358.
6. Agha Shahid Ali, The Half-Inch Himalayas (Wesleyan University Press, 1987). His other volumes of poetry include most recently Rooms Are Never Finished, nominated for the National Book Award in 2001.

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Foreign accents
Notes upon my return to the Diaspora

By Sharmila Sen

THE UNITED STATES’ VERSION of postcolonial studies is particularly focused on questions of diaspora, migration, exile and displacement. These are, no doubt, important issues to address in a classroom in this country. Yet we also need to be careful that we do not empty the postcolony completely. We should not privilege the questions of the diasporic as the only questions to be asked of postcolonial literatures. We also have to work against uncomplicated celebrations of the diaspora, and of the diasporic subject. Working in a country where everyone is only too ready to grab at some sort of hyphenated identity, it is important to remain attentive to the differences within diasporas, or between overlapping diasporas.

In a different register, we need to move from the question, Is this hybrid? to the question, How is this hybrid? Are all hybridities, to put it bluntly, built equal? How useful is it to read Shani Mootoo, Meera Syal, Jhumpa Lahiri and Anita Desai as all part of the South Asian diaspora? The danger, as I see it in the classroom, is the simultaneous stretching of the concept of diaspora (we are all diasporic) and the proprietary, solipsistic reduction of it (we are all in my kind of diaspora). Much as in border studies elsewhere in the academy, the undergraduate classroom in the United States needs to pay attention to the specificity of various diasporas and diasporic writers in the US, while at the same time being careful not to participate in the Americanization of diaspora studies itself.

I teach an introductory lecture course, "Postcolonial Narratives," that draws a wide spectrum of undergraduate and graduate students. Some of them are in literary studies, but most of them are not. One of the initial reasons many of these students enroll is that they want to read something "from outside the canon." As Lauren Berlant writes in a discussion of Deleuze and Guattari's "What is a Minor Literature?", "We have all seen how dominated exotic microcultures have produced what appears to be confectionery on which major cultures have sought to suck, as the meat and potatoes of power left them starved for something else, something other: more."(1) So what drives them at first is the motivation, seemingly benign, to sample the different, the exotic, the non-canonical, the non-white, the non-western, the "more."

I often tell the students in this class about a festival organized by the city of Toronto in the summer of 2000. Nighat Khan, a close friend of mine, who is a well-known feminist activist in Pakistan, told me this story. Nighat was a visiting faculty member at the University of Toronto at the time. As part of this so-called multicultural summer festival, the city had issued replicas of passports. As you wandered from one stall to another, from one immigrant/ethnic neighborhood to another, you collected stamps in your false passport. Imagine eating samosas or curry goat or spring rolls and getting stamps from India or Trinidad or Vietnam. Now, imagine buying a trinket from a stall or watching a "folk dance" on the street and collecting more such stamps on your false passport. This summer festival was a peculiar late twentieth-century reprise of the colonial expositions in Paris or London. The idea is that you, resident of Toronto, can easily travel through the world, eating, buying and looking, without ever leaving the comforts of Canada. Meanwhile, many of the people working behind those counters--the women, for instance, who are dancing Bharat Natyam on the street, or cooking the curry goat, or selling "indigenous" crafts--probably have a vastly different relationship to passports (real and fake), visas and stamps from immigration officers. This story often becomes my negative model: my course is resoundingly not a world tour from comfortable classrooms in Harvard Yard.

I ALSO TEACH A COURSE on the Indian novel in English. I chose to use "Indian" instead of "South Asian" because I did not want to make superficial gestures toward inclusivity (remember that the term "South Asian" has its provenance not in South Asia but in CIA offices). We conclude the course with a couple of diasporic novels--novels that are not only by diasporic writers but thematize the diasporic narrative--David Dabydeen's The Counting House and Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke.

Hamid's novel is set in Lahore, Pakistan. It is, on the one hand, about the disintegration of one life, and on the other hand, about the disintegration of friendships, families, empires, alliances. In the class, I ask my students to consider the following question: Can this be seen as a diasporic novel, a novel that thematizes diaspora (scattering)? What are the usefulness and the problems of locating Pakistan in the Indian diaspora? Historians such as Ayesha Jalal would remind us that the Indian Congress represented the creation of Pakistan in 1947 as secession from the Union of India. So, instead of the midnight births of Pakistan and Hindustan on August 14-15, 1947, the world saw the birth of Pakistan and India (India being the imagined whole of which Pakistan is a part). To complicate the situation further, we need to keep in mind that for millions the creation of Pakistan was also the creation of a new Muslim homeland. So, is it possible to be an Indian diasporic living in Pakistan when your very homeland has been re-defined and shifted from one part of the subcontinent to another?

In 1996, I was living in Lahore and working with a Pakistani NGO on a project on Partition. Part of my work included analyzing oral narratives of women who migrated to Pakistan from India during the months following Partition. In the interviews, most of the women used the same Urdu words--watan, mulk and qaum--to describe both their old homes and their new homes. Of course, these oral histories would have been even more complicated had we looked at women who had migrated from India to East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. How have their narratives of home changed in the past fifty years? The role of women, as it became clear from those interviews, in establishing new homes in the new "homeland" was crucial in the years following Partition. These women, it cannot be forgotten, were often doubly dislocated because while men traveled with their natal families, women often had to forsake their natal families and migrate with their husband's families.

The maternal side of my family has lived in Allahabad in northern India for almost a century. They have lived in probash, in the Bengali diaspora, while still within India. So, when I attend an event organized by the local Bengali association in Boston, Prabasi (the more Sanskritic spelling for probashi), which diaspora am I in? Is this the same Bengali diaspora as the one to which my mother's relatives might belong? Why is the Boston association largely a Bengali Hindu group? Where have all the Muslims of the Bengali probash gone? How does the line between West Bengal and Bangladesh divide those in the global Bengali diaspora? One can, of course, ask this question of the larger South Asian diaspora as well. What are the faultlines between Indo-Caribbean or Afro-Asian or Indo-Fijian or Non-Resident Indian (NRI) populations within the larger, undifferentiated mass we call the South Asian diaspora? In the Indian grocery store, Shalimar, in Central Square, Cambridge, I see us all, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Nepalis, Guyanese, Trinidadians and Americans, reaching for the same jars, boxes, packets. Most of these products are imported from India or produced in the US or the UK by first- or second-generation Indian-owned companies. Do Indian tastes dominate the varied palates of the vast South Asian diaspora?

The answer is a resounding yes if one visits Mattai's, the most popular Indian grocery store in Georgetown, Guyana, a nation with almost fifty percent East Indian population. Harry Mattai, the proprietor, buys most of his prepared Indian foods, pickles, Basmati rice and spice mixtures from India through wholesalers in New York, London, or Toronto. When my husband and I visited his store in the summer of 2001, he ruefully showed us a number of items sitting on the shelves. While Harry had eagerly imported certain packaged foods from India, he and his customers had no idea how to cook them. Diasporic amnesia was competing with the equally powerful desire for diasporic return.

Meanwhile, the old homeland, India, came in packages bearing labels such as Patak's (a British brand) or Deep (an American brand). The descendants of the nineteenth-century indentured laborers, part of the South Asian diaspora in the Caribbean, are now developing a taste (in food, music, clothing) for India as produced by the newest arrivals from the old homeland in spaces such as Jackson Heights in New York and Ilford in London. So we have multiple Indias (and Pakistans, Bangladeshes, Sri Lankas, Nepals) grazing past each other, living in solidarity, in strategic alliance, in mutual antagonism. In the multiple diasporas of South Asia, we sometimes marry each other (thanks to the online matrimonial sites multiplying rapidly on the Internet every day), trade with each other, converse with each other, watch Hindi movies with each other, worship with each other, and even commodify each other.

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, I went to a show put together by the South Asian students at Harvard called Ghungroo. It was a sold-out show. I got front row tickets only because I was a faculty member and had some of the performers in my classes. They had about five shows in one weekend, each a two- to three-hour extravaganza. Each more crowded than the next. The audience members, to my surprise, were not only South Asian students and their families. There were students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds crowding the two-level Agassiz Theater at Harvard. Ghungroo itself featured the standard fare as far as South Asian "cultural programs" on US campuses are concerned. There was the requisite "classical" dance, a skit parodying stereotypical South Asian foibles, a light classical vocal performance, a sitar or tabla piece, dances based on latest Bollywood hits, a raas (before intermission) and a bhangra (as the finale).

What caught my attention was the opening formulation. As the lights dimmed in the Agassiz Theater and the curtain slowly parted, we were treated to a beautiful voice-over introducing the evening's vision. The voice caught me by surprise: an exquisite, poised, Karachi Grammar School-trained female voice. Having met many Karachi Grammar School graduates, I just cannot miss that accent, though I suppose it could have been the voice of any of the top handful of the very elite schools to which the richest South Asians send their children. BBC English ever so delicately shot through with a South Asian accent. The barest touch of the subcontinent coming through in the unaspirated initial consonants. Why did the students, most of who are second-generation South Asian Americans from places like Simsbury, CT, or Louisville, KY, or Cherry Hill, NJ, choose that voice as their introduction?

This was, of course, the least representative of their collective voices. Yet, the voice was also representative of some of their desires. It was the type of voice of South Asia that many of my students, I suspect, would like to present to their friends and classmates. It is neither the crude Indian English accent like that of Apu from The Simpsons, nor the perfectly anodyne American accent of the second-generation desi. The voice represents what the American desi yearns for, is nostalgic for, would like to return to. The rub is that, for most of them, that voice is hardly the voice of their familial past.

Accents are important in understanding the cultural politics of the American classroom. "I was struck by your American accent," a student confessed to me two years ago. "Why?" I asked, "I have lived in the United States since I was almost twelve years old. How else did you expect me to speak?" How else do you expect someone who has been on both sides of the Ghungroo curtain to speak? So, let me add to the above story of Ghungroo: I was part of the small group of undergraduate South Asian students at Harvard who founded Ghungroo a little more than a decade ago. Ghungroo, we told ourselves, was the name of the bells that classical Indian dancers wear on their ankles. And, as those of us in the know smirked, it is the name of a disco in the Maurya Sheraton in New Delhi, a posh hangout for the cell-phone class in India's modern capital. Ghungroo worked on a number of levels: the name invoked both the stereotypical figure of the female classical dancer (for the multicultural delectation of the West) and a space of Westernized privilege in a modern Indian metropolis.

Ten years ago, our first Ghungroo performance was in a gym with homemade curtains and fewer than twenty people in the audience. My students love to hear this story and it gives me the dubious thrill of feeling like I am 31 going on 91. Yet, I sense, they are also a little unsettled. I am a little too close to them (in terms of immigration generation) to be teaching about South Asia. Do I know what I am talking about?

What we have is a set of received ideas that make it okay for white faculty (with any kind of Western accent) and first-generation South Asian faculty (preferably with the posh, Anglicized accent) to lecture on South Asia. Either one is of European descent and trained in the academy as a South Asianist, or one is South Asian and teaches from her lived, authentic experience. I am part of the first wave of second-generation South Asian Americans (though sociologists would label me generation 1.5) in the US academy. There will be many more like me as the children of 1965 come of age. And we shall continue to work alongside the first-generation South Asians in the years to come. But we shall hardly come together in some sort of uncomplicated, joyous, South Asian diaspora in the US academy. Not there, not yet.

THE SECOND-GENERATION South Asian teacher in an American classroom, then, must tread carefully, avoiding, even to the detriment of student pleasure, the role of a surrogate authentic ancestor figure. She must teach from her second-generation perspective while still remaining careful not to Americanize everything that comes her way. So, when a student from the Bronx hastily says that yes, of course, she "gets" the girmitya experience in Trinidad, the teacher must be the killjoy who, despite--or, perhaps because of--easy postcolonial pieties, must make New York's Bronx and the Caroni fields of Trinidad discontinuous. For now at least. And at the same time, the teacher must work against the desire for absolute discontinuity, absolute difference and absolute exoticism.

Speaking of diasporic women writers in particular, I like the work of Meera Syal (even her British television series Goodness Gracious Me can produce great lessons in a cultural studies course). I have made my peace with Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and find it a pedagogically useful text. Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night is wonderful, as is Patricia Powell's The Pagoda and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven. Sara Suleri's Meatless Days is exquisite. Suleri's book, somewhat incongruously, brings to mind the paradox of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. The return to the native land, in Césaire's poetry and in Suleri's memoir, is simultaneously a return to the diaspora.

There is politics in how you name a course, in what you put on the syllabus, in what you do not, in which examples you use, in which theorists and scholars you cite, in which links you make between different texts, in which allusions you let fall by the wayside. There is politics in resolutely teaching the postcolony in an English department where the main contribution of postcolonial theory has been, rather ironically, to usher in an era of imperial studies. But the most politically useful and difficult task, the way I see it, is to teach the students that the classes, the syllabi, the lectures that do not overtly advertise their politics (or even claim they have none) are always political as well.

1. Lauren Berlant, "'68, or Something," Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994) 135.

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Class conflict
Student resistance and nationalism in the classroom

By Michiko Hase

I WAS THE TENTH WEEK of the sixteen-week semester at a state university in the western United States, whose student population is predominantly white and middle- to upper-middle class. The topic of the day was military violence against women in war and armed conflict, especially Japan's military "comfort women" system during World War Two.

Along with readings on the history of that system, I had assigned my own unpublished paper on the transnational feminist redress movement and the positionality of Japanese women, past and present, in that chapter of Japanese history and in the redress movement. In addition to teaching my American students about military violence against women and women's human rights violations, I wanted to raise issues about how women, an oppressed group in their own society, could also participate, albeit inadvertently, in the oppression of women (and men) of other nationalities, races, classes and so on, and how women in such a situation might take responsibility and be accountable for their (inadvertent) complicity in an oppressive system. I also wanted to discuss the role of nation and nationality both in the historical "comfort women" system and in the contemporary redress movement.

I began my lecture by describing my personal engagement with the topic--how I had become interested in the issue and how I related to it--and discussed the issues of responsibility and accountability for me as a Japanese feminist for the history and contemporary redress movement of military "comfort women." I talked about my experience of listening to horrific first-hand accounts by survivors of the "comfort women" system at the NGO Forum on Women held in China in 1995, and how I felt being at an international gathering of women hearing about heinous crimes committed by "my country." My students listened intently and with obvious interest. Following my presentation, the class had a very thoughtful discussion about positionality, accountability, nation and the tension between feminism and nationalism.

This class meeting marked a significant turnaround in "Global Gender Issues," a course which had not gone as I had planned and hoped. Prior to this lecture, some students showed signs of discomfort with and resistance to the material and my approach to the topics. In the previous several years in which I had taught about global gender issues, I had grown increasingly disturbed by students' attraction to topics like female genital surgeries and dowry deaths--namely, practices that concern sexuality and control/violation of woman's body and that are chiefly perpetrated by native men against native women in some distant societies--and by their relative indifference to US roles in the global economy and world politics. In "Global Gender Issues," therefore, I put the United States, its government, its businesses, its military and its influence in, and control of, international agencies like the IMF and the World Bank at the center of the course, along with an emphasis on the agency and activism of Third World women. It was clear that this was a stark contrast to what the students expected to be the center of the course: "the plight of Third World women."

After this "turnaround" class, the students appeared to become more appreciative of the course and me. I read this in two ways. First, when I presented the "comfort women" issue in a way that was very critical of Japan, the students knew that I had not been "bashing" the United States but had been applying my critical analysis to all countries and issues. Second, I believe that discussing my own engagement with the "comfort women" issue and my own complicity in and accountability for Japan's war responsibility presented the students with an example of what I had been talking about when I had discussed US citizens' complicity in and accountability for their government's and businesses' policies and actions.

Because my (mostly) American students and I do not occupy the same subject position of "we Americans" or "we American feminists," and because I am often perceived by some students as inferior and/or incompetent on account of my nationality, race, English, among other factors, the teacher-student dynamics in my classes are quite different from those for American teachers, including Asian American teachers. In my classroom, nationality (in conjunction with race) readily becomes a demarcation line between my students and me. As a result, I have come to realize the significance of nation as a category in understanding and analyzing "women's" experiences and the role of nationalism as an element of the student resistance I have encountered in my classes.

IN THE 1990S, as negative consequences of globalization became more and more evident and widespread, women's studies teachers in the United States made a variety of efforts to bring "the global" to their classrooms. These efforts ranged from offering courses on globalization and Third World women to transforming the curriculum by incorporating global issues and perspectives. As part of this growing trend, I have been teaching courses at US institutions since 1993. An "international scholar" from Japan teaching in the United States, I have encountered challenges that are not addressed in the existing literature on internationalizing or globalizing the women's studies curriculum. I believe that as more and more foreign-born women of color are teaching in US institutions of higher education, there is a growing need to address the challenges they face, as well as the significant contributions they can make to the project of globalizing the curriculum.

Accounts of curriculum transformation projects from a global perspective have been published in special issues of major women's studies journals, including Women's Studies International Forum and Women's Studies Quarterly, as well as in individual articles. Many of these accounts show efforts to respond to Chandra Mohanty's critique that "assumptions of privilege and ethnocentric universality, on the one hand, and inadequate self-consciousness about the effect of Western scholarship on the 'third world' in the context of a world system dominated by the West, on the other, characterize a sizable extent of Western feminist work on women in the third world."(1) But most of the accounts of globalizing or internationalizing the curriculum are written from the perspective of Western feminists, assuming that the instructor is a Western feminist. What happens when a foreign-born woman of color teacher presents herself not as a native informant or a representative of Third World women, but rather as a critic of US hegemony in the world and in feminism?

The recurring pattern of student interest in certain topics and indifference to others that I encountered in my classes seemed to me to be a sign of American students' sense of superiority, mixed with their missionary attitude (they have to "rescue" "poor Third World sisters" from oppressive local cultures), their voyeurism and their binary world view of "us" vs. "them." My students' horrified fascination with "barbaric" practices in non-Western societies confirmed time and again Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan's observation that "Western culture continues to acknowledge difference primarily by differentiating the 'exotic' from the 'domestic'."(2) After learning about the "plight" of Third World women, my American students would typically come to the reassuring realization of "how lucky" they were and to the question of how they could help those poor Third World sisters. If these attitudes and assumptions were not challenged, I became convinced, global gender issues courses would end up reinforcing and reproducing such attitudes and preconceptions as well as Western representations of the Third World (women) as the exotic/inferior Other, along with the binary view of "us" versus "them."

It has been my experience that students more readily perceive me as having legitimacy and authority in courses that in some ways relate to my identity, such as a course on global gender issues (my being an "international scholar") and on Asian American women (my being from Asia--a problematic association between course content and my country of origin because it is based on a conflation of "Asian" and "Asian American"). And yet I have encountered student resistance and suspicion even in courses dealing with global issues. Thus far, student resistance has been most pronounced in "Rethinking Global Feminism," a course which critically examines the history and current manifestations of imperial Western feminisms and some recent theoretical contributions by Third World feminists.

The class was small, with thirteen students. All of the students were women and only two of them were women of color. Early in the course, I assigned Vietnamese American law professor Maivân Clech Lâm's article "Feeling Foreign in Feminism," in which Lâm related her experiences of feeling dismissed and made invisible by white feminists, and critiqued white feminists' perception and treatment of Third World feminists. I assigned it in the hope that the article, rich with first-hand accounts of Lâm's experiences, would help expose the students to some of the issues faced by Third World feminists in the US. Contrary to my hope and expectation, however, the students reacted negatively and defensively. Instead of reading the article with empathy from Lâm's perspective, some of the white students clearly identified with the white feminists critiqued by Lâm, blaming her for the problems she was raising rather than attempting to understand what she had to say. This negativity and defensiveness about the first assigned article set the tone for the rest of the semester.

I read the sources of student backlash and resistance in both these courses in two ways: my students' US-centered education and their perception of me as too unqualified or incompetent to critique American feminists. Had I not challenged students' assumptions and preconceptions about Third World women and Western feminisms, I would not have encountered so much resistance. Although I did not offer "Rethinking Global Feminism" again, I incorporated the lessons I learned from teaching it, making drastic changes in my "Global Gender Issues" syllabus in the fall of 1998.

TO HELP STUDENTS BECOME MORE AWARE of the relevance of the category of "nation" to them and, particularly, the differential impacts of the global economy on different populations in the world, I created and used an in-class exercise which might be called "Where Were Your Clothes Made?" First, I ask my students if they know where the tops they have on were made. Typically no students do. Then I have them form pairs and look at the labels on each other's garments. At this point, students usually become more curious about the topic and quite animated and vocal. I then ask them to say aloud the countries' names they have found on their garment labels. As they call out those names, I write them on the chalkboard, clustering them by continent. In addition to the familiar names like Hong Kong, students discover some unexpected or unfamiliar country names that they don't even know how to pronounce or have never heard of, much less know where to locate (e.g., Lesotho and Lithuania). A number of their clothes are made in the USA, a finding which gives me a chance to discuss American sweatshops which exploit recent female immigrants from the Third World and the transnational migration of labor as one aspect of globalization. Having the country names on the chalkboard clustered by continent aids me in discussing the historical process of globalization as well as its current condition. It also allows me to draw students' attention to the uneven effects of globalization on different parts of the world.

This exercise has proven to be both fun and instructive. First, it enables students to see in a very tangible way the connections they have to the world beyond the borders of the United States, even if they do not typically think about the rest of the world. Also, it provides an effective passageway to exploring the impact of the global economy on their lives and the connections between their behavior as First-World "consumers" and the work and lives of Third World women workers both here and abroad. It helps students to realize how they, as (middle- to upper-class) American college students, and the women workers who sewed their clothing are structurally placed in differential positions within the global economy on account of their difference in nationality (in conjunction with class) and, therefore, in unequal relations of power to each other.

The American students I have taught have tended to come to a comforting conclusion about "how lucky" they are after learning about the "plight" of Third World women. Asking questions about where that "luck" comes from is a way to probe the significance of US hegemony--economic, political, military and cultural--in the world to the ways people live in the United States. In other words, I have them question how the material conditions in which they feel "lucky" are made possible and what symbolic messages influence their perception of how lucky they are.

Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey, two of the founding members of the East Asia-US Women's Network against US Militarism and authors of the women's studies textbook Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives, comment:

We argue that people in the United States need to understand the significance of this country's preeminence in the world, manifested culturally--through the dominance of the English language and in widespread distribution of US movies, pop music, books, and magazines--as well as economically, through the power of the dollar as an international currency and the impact of US-based corporations abroad.(3)

Kirk and Okazawa-Rey are referring to the privileges that US citizenship (and residency) accord their holders. Those privileges directly and indirectly derive from US preeminence in the world. When these structural linkages between the "luck" Americans enjoy (albeit unevenly) thanks to their nationality, on the one hand, and the "plight" of Third World women, on the other, are exposed and analyzed, American students can begin to reflect critically on their attitudes of superiority, complacency, and rescue mission.

THIS SELF-AWARE, SELF-REFLEXIVE approach to US hegemony is not the same as the feeling of "guilt"--far from it. As Audre Lorde writes in the context of white women's guilt about racism, guilt is not conducive to positive change but often an excuse for inaction and defensiveness: "all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness, destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection of changelessness.... Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action...." What I strive to achieve in my classes in this regard is a constructive self-awareness and a structural analysis of one's privileges (based on nationality along with class, race, gender, sexual orientation, among other axes of power) as well as the structures of oppression. This awareness and analysis would enable students to grapple with their complicity as well as their own oppression and to form equal working relationships with individuals and groups from different (national, race, class, and so on) backgrounds so that they can work effectively and collectively for social change.

Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins, among other American scholars, have observed that "multicultural education" as it is practiced today tends to mean learning about "other cultures" and appreciating "diversity" (often reduced to the consumption of ethnic food, dress, music and dancing, and other cultural forms).(4) This approach fails to examine critically and challenge the structures of power and privilege that produce and perpetuate inequalities and injustices. Such uncritical or liberal multicultural education may inadvertently serve to preserve and even strengthen the unequal social structure. Similarly, without critical examinations of unequal relations of power between the First and Third World and between the scholar/student and the studied, a globalized women's studies curriculum is in danger of becoming an international version of liberal multicultural education, functioning to maintain and reinforce the structures and power relations that produce inequalities on a global scale. Such international or globalized liberal multiculturalism might also end up reproducing student prejudices and perceptions of the Third World (women) as the inferior Other as opposed to the superior, liberated America(ns). My experience suggests that non-American instructors (of color) may be suitably, if not uniquely, positioned to raise and explore global power imbalance within the context of a classroom. In a classroom in which a foreign-born (woman) professor of color teaches American students, instructor and students do not share the common subject position of "we American feminists." Instead, the instructor-student power dynamics directly and indirectly are shaped by and reflect the larger power imbalance in the world. My experience suggests that these power dynamics can be utilized consciously and effectively as an opportunity to explore and critically examine the issues of nation and nationalism which should be integral to the studies of global issues. This way, then, the complex power dynamics between foreign-born instructor of color and American students around nation(ality), race, class and gender can be a useful site of scholarship and learning, and not simply of struggle.

1. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 51-80.
2. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 7.
3. Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1998), 3.
4. Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, 3rd edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1998), 5-7.

Note: This essay is excerpted from a longer version first published in Feminist Teacher, Vol. 13, 2 (2001), which will also be reprinted in The Feminist Classroom for the Twenty-First Century: Pedagogies of Power and Difference, edited by Amie Macdonald and Susan Sánchez-Casal (St. Martin's Press, June 2002). Reprinted by permission of Feminist Teacher.

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• Linda Gardiner lgardiner@wellesley.edu
• The Women's Review of Books
• Created: January 24th 2002
• Last Updated: March 20th 2002
• Expires: No expiration