From ‘temporary migrants’ to ‘permanent residents’: Indian H-1B visa holders in the United States

Literature on international migration from India in the past has focused on the formation and development of ‘Indian diasporas’; that is, Indians who have moved to various parts of the world and maintain socio-economic, cultural and political lives in India as well as other countries. However, little attention has been paid toward ‘temporary migrants’ who have migrated to different countries with a temporary visa and in the course of time extended their visas to become ‘permanent residents’. Temporary migration from India has become a common trend over the last two decades, especially since the acceleration of globalisation and the developments in the fields of information and communication technologies. Although it is argued that this type of migration took place in the past – for instance, Indians migrated to British, French, Dutch and Portuguese colonies during the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries as indentured labourers for a period of three to five years and later extended their stays – what is new about the current trend is the new state policies of different host countries and the socio-economic and cultural background of the immigrants. This paper is an exploratory study of this contemporary phenomena of movement from ‘temporary migrant’ to ‘permanent resident’, a phenomena which has not been given much attention by academicians and policy makers in India. The present paper outlines this trend with an illustration of Indian H-1B visa holders in the United States.     

Transnational ties and ethnic identities in the parental homeland: second-generation Indian Americans in India

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ‘return’ migration of high-skilled, second-generation Indian-Americans from the United States to India. Based on interviews with fifty-six respondents, it asks: What transnational ties do second-generation Indian Americans maintain with India prior to return? Upon return, what are their ‘reverse’ transnational linkages to the United States? How do these linkages shape their ethnic identities, if at all? Findings suggest that respondents’ transnational ties to India prior to return reinforce their identities as Indian Americans. Once in India, they maintain affective and civic ties to the United States, the country where they were born or raised. Further, American-inflected social ideas and norms shape returnees’ interactions with domestic workers in India. As they grapple with the disparities between Western and Indian norms on the treatment of domestic help, respondents privilege ‘American’ identities. These findings highlight the transnational ties and identity construction and negotiation of second-generation returnees.     

‘It’s Quite Stylish’: Representations of American English and American Culture in English-Training Milieus in Delhi,India

English-training institutes seem to be ubiquitous in India, and they often index the United States through reference to ‘American accent’ training, American teachers, or simply American flags on their storefront signs. Against the broader backdrop of globalization, and through an examination of institute signs and advertisements and interviews with institute students and teachers, I show how ‘America’ is represented, produced, and consumed as a symbolic and cultural category within the cultural domain of English-training institutes.     

On ‘telling better stories’*

Over the course of his forty-year career, Lawrence Grossberg has modelled a form of rigorous, politically-engaged, radically contextual social research. Writing about Cultural Studies in the abstract, he has often characterized this work as, principally, about ‘telling better stories,’ and he attempts to tell them in his work on the contemporary conjuncture through analyses of political struggles in the United States. However, in a moment where calls for and claims of ‘better’ cultural stories abound on both the Left and the Right, what exactly does it mean for Cultural Studies to tell them better? I suggest we can locate attempts to grapple with Cultural Studies’ ‘better stories’ problem in the space between Grossberg’s conjunctural work and his work on the identity and future of Cultural Studies. Highlighting these efforts, I clarify what it means for Cultural Studies to assume the responsibility of telling better stories given the specific contours of the present context.     

Settler colonial power and the American Indian sovereignty movement: forms of domination, strategies of transformation

The article extends the multi-institutional model of power and change through an analysis of the American Indian Sovereignty Movement. Drawing upon cultural models of the state, and articulating institutionalist conceptions of political opportunities and resources, the analysis demonstrates that this framework can be applied to challenges addressing the state as well as nonstate fields. The rational-legal diminishment of tribal rights, bureaucratic paternalism, commonsense views of tribes as racial/ethnic minorities, and the binary construction of American and Indian as oppositional identities diminished the appeal of "contentious" political action. Instead, to establish tribes' status as sovereign nations, tribal leaders aggressively enacted infrastructural power, transposed favorable legal rulings across social fields to legitimize sovereignty discourses, and promoted a pragmatic coexistence with state and local governments. Identifying the United States as a settler colonial society, the study suggests that a decolonizing framework is more apt than racial/ethnicity approaches in conceptualizing the struggle of American Indians.     

同唱一首歌——记“中英妇女文化周”活动(英文)

"中英妇女文化周"于2008年2月10日——17日在英国成功举行,成为"时代中国""2008中国在伦敦"系列大型文化活动的又一亮点,为增进中英两国人民的文化交流架起一座金桥。     

Racism without Races: Reflections on Racialization and Racial Projects

‘The metaphor of race is a dangerous weapon whether it is used for asserting white supremacy or for making demands on behalf of the disadvantaged groups...Treating caste as a form of race is politically mischievous; what is worse, it is scientifically nonsensical’. Andre Beteille (2004: 52) ‘…what is in fact “scientifically nonsensical” is Professor Beteille’s misunderstanding of “race”. What is mischievous is his insistence that India’s system of ascribed system of social inequality should be exempted from the provisions of a UN Convention whose sole purpose is the extension of human rights to include freedom from all forms of discrimination and intolerance – and to which India, along with most other nations, has committed itself” Gerald Berreman (cited in Thorat and Umakant 2004: xxv ) ‘The possibility that the current Indian Hindu-Muslim or upper versus lower-caste conflict may be, in a significant sense, a variant of a modern problem of “ethnicity” or “race” is seldom entertained…”racism” is thought of as something the white people do to us. What Indians do to one another are variously described as “communalism”, “regionalism” and “casteism” but never “racism”’. Dipesh Chakrabarty (1994: 145)     

Reorientalism and globalisation: transnational artists from India and representations of the ‘other’

In this article, I discuss some artists who have emigrated from India to the United States and the United Kingdom whose more recent work contains ‘Orientalising’ imagery influenced by the conjoined forces of the art market, collectors, biennales, globalisation, the Internet, the rapid development of India’s economy and its impact on the global art scene. It seems that fame and fortune for some Indian artists living in the West entails capitulating to the desire for exotic, ornate, sexual and stereotypical representations associated with Indian culture and religion. In contrast, I consider the direction taken by other artists who remain in their country of origin and portray life lived there without being particularly attentive to being Indian, although they may concentrate on social and political issues.     

Answering the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centres

This paper explores the daily, psychic journeys Indian call center agents undergo as they ‘virtually migrate’ between India and the US. A thin cable that runs half way around the globe bridges the ‘here’ and the ‘there’, connecting agents to faraway customers in real time. The new time-space relations generated by this virtual contact create conditions for these workers to undergo a global ‘migration’ from India and to America, even as their bodies remain bounded within the national homeland. To accommodate the US American workday, Indian agents often work the nightshift and sleep during the day, leaving them little time for family, friends, and cultural events. This temporal arrangement displaces them from the daily rhythms of Indian life, generating a sense of loss, longing, and nostalgia for ‘India’. Further, while agents experience a sense of distance from India, they also experience a movement toward ‘America’. Agents’ accounts suggest a feeling of living between worlds, yet their movement is decoupled from physical migration.     

‘Think imperially’: Indian journalists’ goodwill visits to White Australia, 1927 and 1947

ABSTRACT

Academic research on the White Australia Policy has spanned the history of Asian migration and policy-making initiatives in Australia. However, the role of popular transnational media images and stories of the past that inform the socio-cultural understanding of Australia–India cross-cultural relations has been under evaluated. In this paper, using unexplored archival material from popular newspaper reports and columns, I will examine the ‘goodwill visits’ of two Indian journalists, K. K. Lalkaka and Sir R. Srinivasa Sarma, to Australia in 1927 and 1947. By assessing the role of these two journalists, this paper will highlight transnational issues such as migration, ethnicity, race, class and trade between the two countries. Borrowing from Vineet Thakur’s research highlighting the role of first diplomats in the pre-independence era India, this article will contribute to the field of history in Indian diplomatic studies and historiography of Australian–Indian cross-cultural relations.     

Black Immigrants in the United States and the "Cultural Narratives" of Ethnicity

This article argues that social science representations of post-1965 Black immigrants in the United States employ the concept of "ethnicity" in ways that reinforce the racialist myth of Black (American) cultural inferiority. Specifically, the discursive use of Black immigrant "ethnic" and "cultural distinctiveness," while admittedly reflecting an important recognition of the heterogeneity of the United States Black populations, is in fact predicated upon a repackaged "culture of poverty" discourse that serves to reaffirm the overarching racial order. In a discussion of the theoretical and historical development of the concept, I show how the current discourse of "ethnic distinctiveness" perpetuates a form of racism under a theory that denies the relevance of race while it continuously recodes the biological notions of race as "culture." Thus, Black immigrant distinctiveness, when presented through the prism of the cultural narratives of ethnicity, allows for the perpetuation of a "cultural racism" that adversely affects all Blacks in this country. I therefore call for a rejection of ethnicity theory as it is currently conceptualized and suggest the need to ground theories of Black distinctiveness within analyses of power relations and ongoing practices of racial subjugation.     

Not yet the postcolonial era: The (super) nation-state and transnationalism of cultural studies: Response to Ang and Stratton

Abstract

What is the epistemological and political status of the nation-state in the current practices of Cultural Studies? What is the relationship between the transnationalization of capital/super-states and the transnational turn of Cultural Studies? Through analyzing discursive sites of ‘regionalization’, ‘the Postcolonial’, ‘globalization’, this essay attempts to pinpoint unquestioned assumptions in the critical phase of ‘internationalizing’ Cultural Studies. Unless counter-hegemony positions and strategies can be collectively discussed, argued over and formulated, Cultural Studies as an internationalist project will run the risk of losing its critical edges and even reproducing the existing power structure of the nation-states and global capital. An openended geo-colonial historical materialism is proposed to revitalize Cultural Studies as part of a global decolonization movement.     

‘From mosh pit to posh pit’: Festival imagery in the context of the boutique festival

This paper addresses market-based cultural production in the context of the UK festival field, with a focus on the framing of the festival experience through anticipation. In particular, boutique festivals are discussed as examples of a contemporary cultural ‘product category’ which has emerged and proliferated in the last decade. Through discourse analysis of media representations of boutique festivals, we situate the boutique festival in a broader sociocultural discourse of agency and choice, which makes it meaningful and desirable, and outline the type of consumer it is meant to attract. For the contemporary consumer, the boutique festival is presented as an anticipated experience based on countercultural festival imagery, while simultaneously framing cultural participation through consumption. The paper contributes to a wider debate on the construction of the consumer in the cultural economy.     

Divine Development: Transnational Indian Religious Organizations in the United States and India

This article examines how Indian Americans’ religious organizations send not only financial remittances to India, but also social remittances that shape development ideologies. Comparing Indian‐American Hindu and Muslim organizations, I find both groups draw from their socioeconomic experiences in India and use their position as elite immigrants in the United States to identify and empower their respective religious constituencies in India and overturn different social relations (not just religious practices). Hindu Americans draw from their majority status in India to overturn India's lower position in the world system and support poverty alleviation efforts within a neoliberal development framework. Indian‐American Muslims draw from their poor status in India to overturn economic inequities within India by shifting India's development rhetoric from identity to class. Collective religious identities (expressed through organizations) not only affect the intensity of immigrants’ development efforts, but also their content and ideology. These findings urge us to fold transnational religious organizations into contemporary discussions on migration and development.     

Embedding Cultural Literacy in Higher Education: a new approach*

Higher Education institutions face specific challenges preparing graduates to live and work in transdisciplinary and transcultural environments. It is imperative for these institutions to provide their students with the skill sets that will give them the mobility and flexibility to be able to operate efficiently in different cultural and professional contexts. This position paper proposes that developing proficiency in Cultural Literacy will allow graduates of Higher Education institutions to transcend such cultural and disciplinary boundaries. In this paper we define Cultural Literacy in Higher Education as a modus operandi and a threshold concept, following Meyer and Land’s understanding of the term. We also propose ‘Destabilisation’ and ‘Reflection’ as two strategies for teaching Cultural Literacy, and examine three case studies where these strategies were successfully embedded into teaching and learning spaces.     

Nation-building and the political impasse in India’s north-eastern region

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the politics of India’s nationalising policies towards the ‘region’ called the ‘north-eastern region’ in general, and Manipur in particular, of the post-colonial Indian state. Such policies are informed by a two-pronged strategy, the first by militarism and the second by what I identify as developmentalism. This strategy stresses the unilateral nature of India’s nation-building projects, and how it has deliberately or inadvertently brought dissatisfaction among the native population when they have unmasked the disruptive substance of nation-building approach to this hinterland.     

LGBTQ Activist Organizations as ‘Respectably Queer’ in India: Contesting a Western View

This study contests the distinction of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) organizations suggested by earlier scholars as ‘respectable’ — i.e. normalizing, professionalizing and conforming to the dominant cultural and institutional patterns — and ‘queer’, meaning challenging the cultural and institutional forces that ‘normalize and commodify differences’. Using Bernstein's model of identity deployment, it is found problematic to distinguish LGBTQ organizations this way because when the actions of LGBTQ organizations are more complex to describe, it is not warranted to conflate identity goals with identity strategies — whether normalizing (respectable) or differentiating (queer). To examine these concerns, a qualitative inquiry was used to study five LGBTQ organizations in India where the intersections of post‐colonial ethnicity, gender, social class and sexuality offer an intriguing context through which to study queer activism. Based on the findings, it is argued from a post‐colonial perspective that when the socio‐cultural and historical existence of non‐homonormative queer communities and practices is strong, LGBTQ organizations challenge the heteronormative and/or other forms of domination to become ‘queer’. But they may simultaneously become ‘respectable′ by conforming to the diversity politics of non‐profit business, donors, and social movement organizations they seek support from, and turn out as ‘respectably queer’.     

Affective politics and reading/writing poetry from the Northeast of India

ABSTRACT

Theorization of cultural and political issues of Northeast of India often creates a disengagement from the actual cultural performances produced in the region. This unique geo-cultural place is sometimes homogenized. In actuality, it is the home of diverse socio-cultural practices and performances. In the context of globalization, deforestation, Christianization, other internal clashes and external influences, material bodies, here, are continuously being rewritten in socio-cultural sphere. Non-representational theory considers poetry as an effective mode of exhibiting the virtual multiplicity of the nonrepresentational world. This paper will focus on exploring the corpus of Northeast Indian English poetry that focuses on social practices and bodily experiences to interpret the entire cultural flow of everyday life. As Non-representational Theory positions ‘affect’ as a central issue to individual and collective disposition in constituting the affective political discourse, this paper will also indicate some political imperatives by advancing a politics of hope in the realm of socio-political sphere.     

Before,during and after the cultural turn: a ‘Baedeker’ to IR's cultural journey

This article, which is part of a broader attempt to construct a ‘Baedeker’ to IR's cultural journey, contributes to the contested debated on the (ir)relevance of cultural diversity to the study of international relations by providing a picture of where we come from, of where we are now situated and of some of the suggestions as to where we should be going in order not to get lost in this almost uncharted landscape. The first main section discusses why questions pertaining to cultural diversity traditionally have held a surprisingly marginal position within IR and shows how IR before the Cultural Turn was more ‘culture-blind’ than ‘cultureblank’. The second main section turns attention to IR during the Cultural Turn and examines how two influential bids for a culturalist alternative have been better at posing good questions than providing attractive answers, placing IR's cultural journey in a ‘blind-blinded stalemate’. Against this background, the last main section asks where the cultural journey should head after the Cultural Turn and identifies and evaluates four different suggestions for ‘routes’ to proceed by. While they may be at variance when it comes to the specific direction suggested, they all represent attempts to set a course between the culture-blind Scylla and the culture-blinded Charybdis, and indicate in this way that it would be premature to let the problems associated with the Cultural Turn lead to an expulsion of questions relating to cultural diversity from the IR agenda.     

Immigration,trade and ‘ethnic surplus value’: a critique of Indo–Canadian transnational networks

It is often argued that countries hosting large populations of skilled immigrants might benefit from their cultural and economic competencies in the development of international trade networks. Yet, in so doing, the state can be criticized for fetishizing the ethnic immigrant in market terms in order to extract ‘ethnic surplus value’. In this article, I examine these debates empirically in the case of India–Canada immigration and trade using interviews with traders, officials and immigrant entrepreneurs in British Columbia, Canada. Findings suggest that the supposedly positive relationship between trade and immigration is not obvious in the India–Canada case and there is no convincing evidence of the state managing successfully to extract ‘ethnic surplus value’. Rather, what appears most compelling is evidence of what can be termed a discourse of regional disadvantage circulated by immigrant and non‐immigrant business actors alike regarding the nature of India–Canada relations. Interview respondents link this discourse of disadvantage to the regional history of Indian immigration to Canada, which has traditionally comprised Sikhs from rural Punjab, and it functions to essentialize Indian immigrant ethnicity spatially within both the Indian and Canadian contexts. I focus on the theme of the extraction of ‘ethnic surplus value’ and regional disadvantage to reveal the limitations of both arguments about the economic nature of immigrant‐led network development. In both cases, I challenge these ideas with a critical emphasis on the role of immigrant agency and offer a more nuanced and complicated reading of the role of the state. As a result, I offer a detailed reading of how socio‐spatial immigrant networks are formed and operate at the regional scale, and how this complicates more abstract theoretical formulations regarding the trade and immigration nexus.