Conditional futures: South Asian American cultural production and community formation, 1991-2001

Conditional Futures: South Asian American Cultural Production and Community Formation, 1991-2001 traces the development of a politically engaged diasporic consciousness, expressed in contemporary South Asian American literature and other media during the period between the Persian Gulf War and 9/11. This diasporic consciousness sought to challenge the assimilationist, “model minority” selfrepresentation of a previous generation of South Asian American professionals. Responding instead to a set of transnational shifts that shaped the 1990s—including India’s economic liberalization in 1991 and the post-Cold War rise of U.S. military and commercial global dominance—contemporary South Asian American artists and cultural critics, such as Vivek Bald, Meena Alexander, Shani Mootoo, Amitava Kumar and Vijay Prashad, reframed diasporic community as cohering around shared politics, rather than shared origins. Drawing upon a grassroots archive of community organization newsletters, arts periodicals and personal interviews, my analysis reveals the multiple spatial scales of transnationalism that contextualize these artists’ and scholars’ projects: global changes in labor and migration as a result of economic liberalization, on one hand; and a hemispheric diasporic arts activism aligned with feminist, queer and antiracist organizing in New York City and Toronto, on the other. I locate aesthetic innovation as an important response to fiscal and social reforms during the premillennial decade, as it provided a creative plane through which artists imagined “conditional futures”—modes of collectivity that did not yet exist, but could possibly evolve.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Anantha Sudhaka