South Asian Americans: Time To Toughen Up

There’s a great research- and reporting-driven opinion essay by Lydia Polgreen in the New York Times  about how Indian Americans have found themselves flat-footed after the surge in anti-South Asian rhetoric and policy from the right. There are two prongs of this – one is the expansion of policies designed to reduce immigration, and the other being a more insidious cultural turn towards xenophobia and open, unapologetic racism.

The Trump administration, led by Trump himself but also J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller, has been dead-set on reducing both legal and illegal immigration from all non-European countries. The administration can apparently act on this single-handedly – virtually eliminating asylum options, adding onerous fees and paperwork to H-1B visa processes, and making it more difficult and less appealing for Indian students to come study in the U.S. (Indian student enrollment at U.S. universities was down 44% this year.) The good news is that at least some of that may be at least partially reversible the next time there’s a Democrat in the White House. Then again, it is certainly possible that future Democrats, having seen how unpopular Joe Biden’s approach to immigration was, may be reluctant to look “soft” on immigration and keep at least some of the Trump policies in place. (The ICE raids, we can hope, will stop once Trump is out of office.) Without comprehensive immigration reform, it is not clear there is a way to fix everything that’s been broken in the immigration system.

That leaves the racism; this is something we can fight, but first we have to understand it. Some right-wing Indian Americans have been surprised to discover the rapid acceleration of racialized hostility on social media. After encountering an overwhelming array of hostility to his benign Diwali post on social media (choice example: “Go back home and worship your sand demons”), Vivek Ramaswamy asked his peers on the right to “cut the identity politics.” Even Dinesh D’Souza, a commentator who built a long career on anti-Black race-baiting, has finally decided to be a little bit offended (“In a career spanning 40 years, I have never encountered this type of rhetoric. The Right never used to talk like this. So who on our side has legitimized this type of vile degradation?”) To these folks, I would absolutely say, you made your bed, now lie in it.

Photo of the “Statue of Union” in Sugar Land, Texas. From the New York Times. Perhaps we could spend a little less on statues and temples, and a little more on institutions to protect South Asian American civil rights?

Others, like the retired doctor in Texas in Polgreen's story whose community built a 90 foot Hanuman statue at their local Mandir only to discover evangelical Christians in their town protesting at the temple gates, need to wake up to the new realities of American life. Below I have a couple of strategies for how South Asian Americans might toughen up a bit.

Some of what I have to say is hinted at in Polgreen’s piece itself. I would recommend reading through to the second half, where she has some helpful quotes from Suketu Mehta about the delusions some Indian Americans have harbored about how others really feel about them:

But Mehta also wondered whether Indian Americans had become a bit smug about their spectacular success in America over the past six decades, trusting that their wealth and status would shield them from the kind of bigotry that once barred them from entry and citizenship. Indian Americans, he said, tell themselves: “We are the richest, best educated people. We don’t commit crimes. We go to good schools. We came here legally. We’re not like the Mexicans.”

Mehta finds this exceptionalism both understandable and dangerous. The Indians who come to the United States are not just the most ambitious and educated. They also are mostly the beneficiaries of the durable hierarchies of caste, class and religion that stratify Indian life.

Following Mehta’s insightful comments above, it seems to me that the goal for South Asian Americans has to be to build generation-spanning institutions and spend both cultural capital as well as real capital on investments that benefit American society as a whole.

Nobody is impressed by “model minority” rhetoric, and some communities are actively hurt by it. A surprising number of South Asian Americans, especially of the older generation, blithely cite success statistics and low crime rates as if those all happened in a vacuum. And as if other communities haven’t been on the receiving end of generational institutional racism, cyclical poverty, and over-incarceration. 

Nor is there much going to be much benefit in complaining about racism that mysteriously just appeared. Newsflash: it was always there; it’s just more visible now that there are politicians at the top who are willing to exploit it and mobilize it. The kinds of demonization that have been directed against Black folks and Latinos can also be directed against privileged brown immigrants. Indeed, it should not surprise us that this would happen.

So what can we do?

1. South Asian Americans could work together with other minoritized communities to fight anti-Black and anti-Latino racism, all forms of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-Muslim rhetoric wherever any of these may crop up. We need to learn to see those fights as our fights. (Note: this is why "South Asian American" – including immigrants from Muslim-majority South Asian countries as well as Nepal and Sri Lanka – is a better framework for organizing than “Indian American.”)

2. South Asian Americans could use our economic clout to build lobbying groups and PACs to advance South Asian community interests. If a politician running for the U.S. Senate starts posting about Hindu deities as “demons” on social media (as happened with the Hanuman statue in Texas), a strategic offer of a political donation if they can tone it down could do wonders. Otherwise, make a donation to their primary opponent and announce why we’re doing that to the media. Indian Americans have been happy to spend their money building massive, showy temples. In politics, they’ve been somewhat inclined to stay on the sidelines. It’s time for that to change.

3. South Asian Americans need to rally behind politicians who support South Asian communities -- and civil rights and secularism more generally -- and unify against those who don’t. Anyone who talks like Stephen Miller or J.D. Vance should not have a chance of getting our vote. I was not hugely surprised to see that in the 2024 election there was a small but noticeable shift in the Indian American community towards Trump – even at a time when Trump’s opponent was an Indian-American woman! (61% of Indian Americans still voted for Harris in 2024, but one might have expected that number to be higher.) Some of the interest in Trump, admittedly, was due to social media misinformation (see point #4 below), as well as the “economic message.” But some of the softness in support was due to lack of clarity and confusion about what the different parties actually stood for.

4. South Asian Americans probably need to invest in social media influence campaigns to correct falsehoods, misinformation, and out-of-context stories.

In conversations leading up to the 2024 campaign, a surprising number of my friends and acquaintances were citing an old story about Kamala Harris that had been circulating on social media about Kamala Harris’ role as Attorney General in a case in 2011, where a Sikh man with turban and beard sued to be able to hold a job as a prison guard, which requires people to be clean-shaven; Harris supported the state of California’s position on prison guards being clean-shaven to wear gas masks. This is apparently a real story, but it is hardly a reason to say that “Kamala Harris is anti-Sikh.” Again, if we were comparing Harris – a Black and South Asian candidate with a long history of supporting civil rights – to Trump, it should be clear to everyone who is likely more sympathetic to South Asian communities, including Sikh Americans.

Similarly, a number of my family members and friends were duped by the idea – again, popular on WhatsApp – that “Modi and Trump are best buddies, so nothing bad could happen with respect to India or Indians.” They seemed not to realize that Trump meant what he was saying on the campaign trail about radical changes to the immigration system, and what that might entail.

How exactly this might get fixed is not so easy. Some of it could be solved by the platforms themselves. But probably advocacy groups should be thinking about corrective social media influence campaigns to respond to out-of-context stories. These can be tricky to do well, but the incredible success of Zohran Mamdani on social media in the 2025 NYC mayoral campaign might be a model to emulate. Humor, wit, and charismatic messengers could go a long way here.

2025: My Year in Books

1. General Interest Recommendations

Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me. This was a standout for me this year -- Roy's beautifully written memoir of her rocky relationship with her mother. It is also a compelling intellectual autobiography that follows the arc of Roy's career, from her early days (training as an architect; acting in and then writing for films and television), to her more contemporary social justice interventions. The God of Small Things was a work of fiction, but every major character was based on a real person, and many of the difficult things that happened to the children in the novel are based on events experienced by Roy and her family. I especially appreciated the section in Mother Mary Comes To Me on the architect Laurie Baker, someone I'd not heard of before. 

Even now -- and after many, many years of teaching books like The God of Small Things -- I've still never seen Roy's early films (Massey Sahib, directed by Pradip Krishen; In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, which Roy wrote; and Electric Moon, which, frankly, I'd never even heard of!)

Massey Sahib (1989) is a kind of loose adaptation of Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson transposed to India; there's a version of it on up on YouTube here.

There's a version of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1990) here. (This film, which is based on Roy's experience in a school of architecture in Delhi in the 1970s, seems like the place to start)

I don't see any versions of Electric Moon (1992) online. (Probably ok; in her account of it in the memoir, Roy suggests that this film, a hybrid British-Indian production made with BBC funding, was a bit of a misfire.)

Caoilinn Hughes, The Alternatives. File under: thoughtful climate fiction. A readable but somewhat idiosyncratic novel of ideas; what would it really mean to move to rural Ireland and drop off the grid? What sacrifices would it require, especially in terms of your personal relationships and your family? At the center of this smart novel are four sisters, each with a Ph.D. -- one a philosopher, one a geologist, one a caterer, and the fourth a political scientist. The debates between the sisters form the core of the novel. Some of the philosophy might be a little abstruse for readers (Kant!), though Hughes does find ways to make it accessible enough and relevant to the core ethical dilemmas she wants to explore. 

Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore. File under: climate fiction + thriller. A novel set on a remote island outpost near Antarctica (Shearwater Island), with a group of caretakers whose main job is to protect a doomsday seed bank. The novel has the stylized language and lyricism of literary fiction, though in the second half it turns more into a thriller plot. Overall, it made me curious to visit the place itself, though given its remoteness that seems far-fetched. (Let's start by getting ourselves to Australia or New Zealand first...)

Percival Everett, James. I'm guessing most people in my circle have read this brilliant rewriting of Huckleberry Finn from Jim/James' point of view -- it was on everybody's top ten lists last year. I finally read it this year; it's very good. I especially liked the investment in James' interest in writing his own story: "With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. Wrote myself to here." Also: "I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written." This theme of the novel reminded me of other 'postcolonial' texts that write back to the Anglo-American Canon -- and that thematize the act of writing as a central part of coming to own one's subjectivity (see: J.M. Coetzee's Foe). I've never taught Uncle Tom's Cabin, but if I were to do that in the future, I would do it alongside James. 

Modernist Studies Association 2024: A few notes

I was recently at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in Chicago. I've been going to the conference on and off for many years (going back to the early 2000s?). Lately, I've been going there to present on materials relevant to my digital projects. If interested, slides from my presentation are here.

I'm not going to try and give a comprehensive account of what I saw and did at MSA, but below are a few highlights. Overall, the vibe was good -- despite the wild week in US politics, everyone seemed eager to talk about their research. Indeed, in a few cases (especially with some of the material related to queer and trans writers), it seemed like there was a more intense relevance in light of the growing anti-trans tendency in public discourse. 

Saturday Keynote: Nella Larsen's Passing

It was fun to have the Saturday keynote be a screening of the 2021 Netflix adaptation of Passing, followed by a panel discussing it. The film was great (I hadn't seen it!), and the panel discussion following, with Rafael Walker, Pardis Dabashi, and Cyraina Johnson-Roullier, was lively and enlightening. My main takeaway from the panelists was that the film is a pretty faithful adaptation of the novel, but it's more optimistic about love and less pessimistic about the affect of racism on personal relationships than Larsen's book. 

 

Queer and Trans Writing

Panel attended: Transing modernism/queering modernism

Jaime Harker, University of Mississippi 

Chris Coffman, University of Alaska, Fairbanks 

Aaron Stone, University of Virginia 

Mat Fournier, Ithaca College Marquis Bey, Northwestern University 

Marquis Bey, Northwestern University

This was a standout panel. Papers on Bryher, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, and more

The idea of thinking about Bryher as a trans figure seems especially worthwhile. Also, the paper on Orlando mentioned some recent adaptations of the novel, including a film called Orlando: My Political Biography as well as a 2019 opera adaptation by Olga Neuwirth.

There were also a couple of papers that were theoretical / auto-theory interventions on the concept of dysphoria, and the concept of gender itself (memorable phrase: "from gender dysphoria to gender euphoria"). 

* 

At another panel I attended, I saw another paper dealing with trans issues -- Michael Mayne of Denison University. He had rewritten parts of his paper at the last minute to reflect the results of the election. (In recent years, 664 anti-trans bills have been proposed by state legislatures. In the recent election, 41% of the ads for Trump were anti-Trans ads. 

The Well of Loneliness is increasingly being read as a trans novel (including by scholars like Jack Halberstam and Leslie Feinberg). Mayne's emphasis was on the idea of transness as abjection in Hall's novel. He also mentioned Julia Serano's idea of "Effemimania" (a term I hadn't heard before), and Susan Stryker's idea of the prospect of trans writers reclaiming the "monster." 

*

At another panel, Pamela Caughie gave a presentation on "Bloombsury's Gender Politics," where she alluded to the painter Dora Carrington, who was not quite trans, though she did engage in some transgressive gender play, and who was certainly queer and polyamorous (key line: "How I hate being a girl! Tied with female encumbrances and hanging flesh"). 

Caughie also mentioned many other writers who were new to me, including Rosamund Lehmann (Dusty Answer, 1927), and Denton Welch (Maiden Voyage, 1943). 

Early Postcolonials

For many years, the MSA has been a welcoming place for people doing work on what we might think of as "early postcolonial" literature (1950-1980, roughly). This is the era of people like Naipaul and Lamming, Khushwant Singh, Mulk Raj Anand, C.L.R. James, etc. 

*

On the panel where I presented, Ben Fried gave a paper on the relationship between V.S. Naipaul and his publisher, Andre Deutsch. Deutsch was a Jewish immigrant who fled from German-occupied Europe. Deutsch and Diana Athill worked together to form a new publishing house (Allan Wingate), which published Naipaul and many other postcolonial writers. Throughout his early career, Naipaul struggled with the tension of being a highly culturally grounded writer at a time when publishers were looking for "universal" appeal. 

*

On another panel, I saw a paper by Rochona Mojumdar of the University of Chicago. She was interested in the dialogue between Mrinal Sen's early 1970s "Calcutta Trilogy" and radical Latin America in the "Third Cinema" movement -- specifically, Fernando Solanas' revolutionary classic, La Hora de Los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), and Sen's Padatik (1973). There's an interesting moment of borrowing or appropriation in Sen's film -- where he takes the exact footage of police beating protestors that also appears in Solanas' film. 

*

I also attended this panel:

R28. Mediating Empire: Comparative Colonialisms, Comparative Media Studies

Chair: Jessica Berman, University of Maryland, Baltimore County 

Daniel Morse, University of Nevada, Reno 

Stephen Pasqualina, University of Detroit-Mercy 

Abhipsa Chakraborty, SUNY Buffalo 

Nasia Anam, University of Nevada, Reno

This was another standout panel, with papers on radio adaptations of Raja Rao's Kanthapura, CLR James' broadcasts on the BBC, and more. Recent scholarship on the BBC's radio broadcasts has really expanded our understanding of how postcolonial literature emerged as a new formation during and after World War II.

Of note: Daniel Morse's book Radio Empire and Peter Kalliney's The Aesthetic Cold War.

*

On Sunday morning, I was in a Digital Humanities Seminar, on "Modernism in/and as Data." It was a fun and productive discussion.