Immediately following 9/11, South Asians experienced a record increase in incidents of hate crime, violence, and bias in the United States. In chapters 1 and 2 of the book, author Christine Garlough provides a history of discrimination against South Asians in the United States that dates back to the turn of the twentieth century, when South Asians were the focus of intolerance. In 1907 mobs forced hundreds of South Asians to flee across the Canadian border, and later in 1923 the Asiatic Exclusion League successfully pressured the Supreme Court to revoke the citizenship rights of South Asians. In light of the past and ongoing resentment, this book explores how South Asians have responded to these threats, especially after 9/11, through cultural performances by women of South Asian descent in the United States. Garlough analyzes these performances, which include personal testimonies and narratives, using two theories of “an ethic of care” and a “call for acknowledgment” that stay central to her arguments throughout the book.
Building on works by Virginia Held, Garlough describes “an ethic of care” as a concentration on attentiveness, trust, and responsiveness to need that helps us to understand human beings as fundamentally “interdependent” beings. Applied to concepts of citizenship, for instance, an ethic of care helps us reach towards a concept of citizenship that is more enriched and better able to cope with diversity and plurality.
The “act of acknowledgment” is a communicative strategy that a critical ethic of care entails. Acknowledgment, Garlough states, has the potential for healing and hope, essential to communal spirit, social activism, and the moral well-being of humankind. For Garlough, acknowledgment is something that is beyond recognition. She argues that recognition can be private and may entail seeing someone without showing any recognition, while acknowledgement is more public and makes one more aware and more willing to confirm the “Other.”
In this book, theories of “an ethic of care” and “acts of acknowledgment” intersect with performance theory that Garlough borrows from Folklore, especially in relation to the role that the audience plays in its responses to these performances. Garlough argues that these acts of acknowledgement and ethics of care influence audiences to better understand, reciprocate, and connect with the stories of these women who use their performances for social and local grassroots activism to successfully pass on the messages of racism, suffering, and violence to the wider public.
Garlough’s book is a good example of the way theories of folklore, feminism, performance, and rhetoric weave together to provide deep analyses of women’s cultural performances within community organizations that aim towards political activism and social change. The core of the book is the in-depth analysis of three case studies that make up chapters 3, 4, and 5 of the book. Chapter 3 describes the setting up of an India cultural booth at the Festival of Nations event in Minnesota. In this chapter, Garlough analyzes the making of the Indian rangoli (sand painting using colored powders, a popular women’s folk practice in India) by a South Asian woman named Sheela and the interaction between Sheela and the audience that gathers around to watch, converse, and listen while she performs the rangoli.
Chapter 4 provides an ethnographic analysis of a semiautobiographical dance performance called Rise by Shyamala Moorty, a Post Natyam dancer, that addresses issues of racial profiling, xenophobic rhetoric, and hate crimes post-9/11. The focus of Garlough’s analysis is not only Moorty’s performance (in which at the end of one segment, Moorty plunges the American flag down a toilet), but also the question-and-answer session that takes place after the show where the audience is asked to “perform” through participation their responses to Moorty’s performance. Chapter 5 examines the performances at one Yooni ki Baat (Our Vaginas Speak) event, a South Asian equivalent of Vagina Monologues, organized by a San Francisco-based cultural group called South Asian Sisters, where Garlough looks particularly at the performance of a woman named Roopa and the way that she engages the audience through a call-and-response to her piece on surviving childhood sexual abuse in the family.
Throughout these case studies, Garlough’s focus is equally divided between the performer and the audience, where the ethic of care and acknowledgement is taking place. By sharing and acknowledging these stories, both the performer and audience are interacting, connecting, and reciprocating care about these issues and about Self and Other, which is the basis for social justice and continued activism within the community and outside. Garlough concludes the book by examining the genre of “critical play” and its ability to provide the “liminal” space and time for invention and reflection that give the audience the opportunity to acknowledge and show care for the performances and the messages that they are trying to communicate.
What makes this book a successful addition to the field of folklore is not only its emphasis on individuals, attention to cultural performance, and examination of community, but more importantly its focus on the vernacular. Garlough makes a strong point that a response to the discrimination against South Asians in the United States has been the topic of much debate, political speeches, and social protests. But she has chosen instead to study the voices of the vernacular because to her they evoke in their performances the element of consideration and shared suffering and struggle that bridge the gap between Self and Other and insert an often-marginalized diasporic perspective into current events.
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[Review length: 899 words • Review posted on February 12, 2014]