Both the film Mississipi Masala and “Flipping the Gender Script” explore interactions between Black people and South Asian people. In “Flipping the Gender Script”, South Asian hip-hop artists have to navigate the world of hip-hop not only with gendered limitations, but raced ones as well. Black female hip-hop artists were exclusionary towards D’Lo and Deejay Bella because they were working hard enough to be accepted in the hip-hop community as women, and there seemed to be limited room for inclusion.

In Mississipi Masala, Mina and Demetrius fall in love and have to deal with their parents’ reactions to their romance. The scene I found most interesting was when Demetrius confronts Mina’s father and says he is “only a few shades lighter”, referring to his attitude that Demetrius is not good enough for his daughter. It is made clearer toward the end of the film that part of Mina’s father’s prejudice against Demetrius and his romance with Mina is the reason why he left Uganda: his Black friend tells him he has to leave Uganda because Africa is only for Black Africans. I perceived this to be part of the reason that Mina’s father is resentful towards Black people. Thus, his perception of race is affected by his position in the South Asian diaspora– Uganda was his home, where he had been born and raised, but even in Uganda he was “othered”.

I think my favorite thing to read/watch this week was the poem “diaspora” from Bodymaps. It sounds like a poetic version of the definition of “diaspora” (from my understanding). What stood out to me was the theme of always “looking back and over your shoulder”, worried that the next place you are headed to will never let you return to the last. Many of the definitions of diaspora that we read included the longing of returning to a homeland, even though it wasn’t always quite certain where exactly “home” was.

A similar/common theme I saw in many of our texts/videos was the tension felt by these queer authors between their identity as South Asian and their queer identity. They are made to feel as though queer sexualities are a western import and separate from who they really are (or maybe, who they are expected to be).  One example of this was in “Trans/Generation” when Alok Vaid-Menon says that “rather than call his grandmother transphobic,  [he] will join her in not smiling in the family photo”. I read this as there being a part of him that wants to resist the way his grandmother marks him as “different”, but there also being another part of him that wants to stand in solidarity with the oppressive experiences she has had. However, it is difficult to articulate having a multicultural identity by saying that there are “parts” of you, because this leaves you wondering if you can ever be “whole”. What do the “parts” of a multicultural identity add up to? Perhaps diaspora is about feeling as though you are “parts”, rather than a “whole”.

Chandra Mohanty’s article about the colonizing discourse of Western feminists is an important piece that also speaks to issues of intersectionality and power differentials. Mohanty urges readers to stay away from universalizing women as a class, and reminds us to acknowledge the variety of differences that separate women and create hierarchy within this category.

Nagar’s article is a useful example that underscores the importance of Mohanty’s arguments. Nagar argues that gender, race, class, and religion all influenced migration patterns from India to Tanzania. The many differences that Nagar highlights in migration patterns serve to illustrate the difficulties of universalizing the class of “women”, and also shows why it should not be done.

There were a lot of interesting elements of Fire, so here I’m just going to discuss a connection I found between the film and Nagar’s article. Ideas about “purity” in the Indian diaspora (particularly Hindus) were a huge theme in Nagar’s article. I looked up Karva Chauth, the fast that the two women in the film undertake, and found that it was a Hindu tradition. I also noticed that there were a lot of references to the women’s purity in the film, including a story about a woman who must survive being burned to prove that she is “pure”. I wonder what exactly “pure” means in this context. Because Radha survives the fire at the end of the movie, does that signify her purity? I think here, “purity” means the absence of wrongdoing because I noticed that, after Radha and Sita kiss, Sita asks Radha if they have done anything wrong. Radha replies that they hadn’t.

I’m going to start off by talking about the Niranjana article, since I feel I have more to say about the novel we read for this week. Niranjana discusses Indian nationalists’ concern with the migration of “immoral” women to become indentured laborers in the Caribbean from around 1882 to 1900. Something I found interesting about this concern with “immorality” is that one of the possible explanations given for the amount of “immoral” women working as indentured servants was that only women from the lower castes made good indentured laborers, and that women from higher castes would not be so immoral. This made me think about the relationship of purity/impurity to caste that we discussed in class last week. It also reminded me of the discourse of unnatural/natural sex, because both moral/immoral and natural/unnatural are extremely vague but heavily charged binaries.

In Cereus Blooms at Night I paid close attention to the nuanced ways in which sexuality was referred to by different people. (I also considered that it might only be that way because of a choice the author made– the story is, after all, being told through his narrative voice).  For example, the way Mala chooses to tell Chandin that she accepts his sexuality is by bringing him a female nurse’s dress for him to wear. She doesn’t make a spectacle out of the gesture, causing Tyler to take it as a genuine acceptance of his true self.

I thought the development of the relationship between Sarah and Lavinia was very subtle, but then realized that this might have only been my initial reaction due to the fact that the identity of queer South Asian women is framed as being “impossible”. I had to check myself and my assumption that they were nothing more than friends from the start of their relationship.

Finally, I find myself wondering how I can connect the Niranjana article to Cereus Blooms at Night. Can they be connected, and if so, how?