Producing South Asian America: Community, Digital Media, and Connectivity

This dissertation examines the formation of South Asian America over the last fifteen years as a coalitional identity intended to circumvent divisions both subcontinental (e.g. religious, national, linguistic, colorist, caste-based) and domestic (e.g. racial, class-based). While the fruits of this mobilization are beginning to be seen in mainstream U.S. media, the backbone of this nascent movement is a community that gathered, organized, and communicated with itself using a variety of digital media sites and practices over the last decade and a half. South Asian Americans are positioned at a pivot point between, on the one hand, transnational and national ethnocentrisms, and, on the other, similarly multi-scalar visions of the miraculous, increasing flow of technologies and capital. The media producers and curators of coalitional South Asian America take up this position, as desired yet dangerous members of the American body politic, for their own political ends, producing digital media to build and maintain a new community. The advocates of South Asian America, taken together, place themselves at a crux in multiple scales of racialized, capitalist empire to critique it and produce solidarities with marginalized communities within and without. This dissertation is an examination of the abundance of unremarked yet remarkable labor that undergirds this formation, from repetitive production of blog posts, digital archive entries, and podcasts, to responding to hundreds of comments, to elaborate infrastructures and acts of affirming, listening, reading, and sharing. This dissertation reveals how, to build South Asian America, complex forms of identity and diasporic belonging are managed and imagined through iterative, mundane, and loving acts of mediated labor. This dissertation reframes the meaning of connectivity—as a cultural practice and process as well as a technical phenomenon—and the labor that goes into its production and management. Re-conceptualizing connectivity allows us grounded purchase to explore the affective drive for diasporic connection that has inspired this unceasing and underappreciated labor. This new conceptualization of connectivity as both cultural and technical encourages us to consider how community connections, solidarities, and coalitions are built from a wealth of mundane interactions with people and media. To that end, this dissertation uses a multimodal approach in terms of methods, theoretical grounding, and phenomena of study, with particular focus on three multi-person digital media projects: blog and forum Sepia Mutiny (2004-2012), the South Asian Journalists Association podcast (2008-present), and the South Asian American Digital Archive (2008-present). The formation of South Asian America is about imagining the arrival of South Asian Americans as Americans, a project that is complex, uneven, and in progress. It is premised on a coalitional strategy with progressive potential for some of the many communities that, taken together comprise South Asian America, as well as other marginalized and minority American communities. This dissertation unpacks the strategies and countless small human acts that render South Asian America viable, compelling, and legible.PHDCommunicationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143949/1/lwolock_1.pdfDescription of lwolock_1.pdf : Restricted to UM users only