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Abstract
Recent research suggests that the children of recent immigrants, the so-called second generation, no longer choose to emphasize one identity over the other but that their identities are more fluid and multifaceted. College campuses are often the arenas in which a new hybrid identity develops. This article addresses how South Asian American college students make sense of and control their various identities through the celebration of Diwali, an event sponsored each year by the Indian Students Association (ISA) on a college campus in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. South Asian students use performative space to help them make sense of their backgrounds in ways that both differentiate them from and allow for association with the majority student population. They also use this space as a safe place for “coming out,” that is, for communicating their hybrid identity to their parents. This hybrid identity is expressed through a discourse of “brownness” that marks something distinctive and that reflects the process by which the children of immigrants choose among a range of identities to create integrated selves. The campus Diwali festival is the expression of those selves.
Notes
1. The research on which the analysis here draws was part of a larger study of civic engagement and identity among Asian Indians immigrants and their children in DFW. The larger project was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation and includes a comparison with Vietnamese immigrants for which Deborah Reed-Danahay is co-investigator. Any ideas and opinions offered here are those of the authors and not of the Russell Sage Foundation or the co-PI.
2. Texas had 7.7 percent of all Indians in the United States in 2000.
3. For further discussion of these demographics, see CitationBrettell 2005 and CitationDhingra 2007.
4. CitationShukla (2003: 299) cites a letter published in 2002 in India Abroad, a national newspaper for Indian immigrants written by a young woman of the second generation.The woman wrote, “As the American-born daughter of Indian immigrants, I rarely interacted with people of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin or heard the words ‘South Asian’ until I went to College.”
5. For further discussion of the IAFC, see CitationBrettell and Reed-Danahay (2008).
6. The different attitudes toward race between first and second generation Indians in the United States has certainly been noted by other scholars (CitationVisweswaran 1997; CitationKhandelwal 2002; CitationKoshy 2002; CitationDhingra 2003; CitationKurien 2005; CitationBhatia 2007). For a broader discussion of the concept of brownness among Latinos and Asian Americans, see CitationEileen O'Brien's (2005) provocative analysis of the “racial middle.” CitationMyers (2005: 129) emphasizes that brownness, unlike blackness and whiteness, is less “tied to one specific racial/ethnic group” and is also more fluid—“its signification varies across contexts more than blackness and whiteness do.”