Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States
216
Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States
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Overview
As Mallapragada shows, ideologies around family and citizenship shift to fit the transnational contexts of the online world and immigration. At the same time, the tactical use of the home page to make gender, racial, and class struggles visible and create new modes for belonging implicates the web within complex political and cultural terrain. On e-commerce, community, and activist sites, the recasting of home and homeland online points to intrusion by public agents such as the state, the law, and immigration systems in the domestic, the private, and the familial. Mallapragada reveals that the home page may mobilize to reproduce conservative narratives of Indian immigrants' familial and citizenship cultures, but the reach of a website extends beyond the textual and discursive to encompass the institutions shaping it, as the web unmakes and remakes ideas of "India" and "America."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252096563 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2013 |
| Series: | Asian American Experience |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 855 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Virtual Homelands
Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States
By Madhavi Mallapragada
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09656-3
CHAPTER 1
Homepage Nationalisms
Silicon Indians and Curry Codes
Home, as Mary Douglas has insightfully noted, while not necessarily fixed in space, starts by bringing space under control; creating home spaces then involves creating regular patterns of activity and structures, both in place and in time. The physical structure of the house, traditionally inscribed by notions of privacy, security, family, intimacy, comfort, and control, has long represented home at a micro-level. At a macro-level, the idea of home is usually manifested as our origin story, as the place that each of us come from.
While the homeland metaphorically operates as a collective home for the family of national citizens (who in turn are invoked within the nation's origin story), for immigrants the story of home is more complex. A traditional sense of belonging—structured around origin myths, validated by legal citizenship, and residing within the national homeland—does not match up with the complex realities of the immigrant's history of migration, the necessity of relocating to a new home and nation, and the engagement with transnational cultures that shape their everyday life and practices. As Ien Ang recounts in the introduction to her book On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West, when she answered "Netherlands," to the question "Where are you from?," it almost always resulted in a subsequent query, "No, I mean where are you really from?" As a Chinese Indonesian immigrant to the Netherlands, her racialized embodiment of difference could not satisfactorily placate the nationalist anxiety at the heart of the question.
For the immigrant, then, belonging is a vexing preoccupation, but it is also open to negotiation. The homepage, in this context, is particularly interesting. The homepage already has the capacity to disrupt the "real" material, physical, and territorial logic of the nation-state. But in addition, it is also a potent site for the possibilities of making and unmaking traditional ideologies of home and homeland. The operative word here is possibilities, since homepages are imbricated within larger political and social contexts of digital capitalism, neoliberal citizenship culture, and transnational strategic alliances. As has been pointed out by many scholars, nation-states have reworked their agendas to align better with neoliberalism and flexible citizenship in an effort to remain relevant in a new world driven by global media, migration, and mobility. When we consider that the Web, in the words of Tim Berners-Lee, is "not a physical thing" that exists "in a certain place" but rather is "a space in which information could exist," we might also use the homepage, drawing on Douglas's insight above, as a trope for bringing spaces—virtual, transnational, and immigrant—into our understanding of the micro-household and the macro-homeland.
As we study transnational communities, such as Indian immigrants, we see the limits of epistemological frames organized around the concept of diaspora and its associated meaning as an "imagined community" without territory. Derived from the Greek speiro (which means to sow) and dia (which means over), the concept of diaspora—notwithstanding critical retheorizations of the term over the past two decades—has long been articulated within narratives of dispersal, movement, dislocation, and relocation. We have seen that the identities of Indian immigrants (like South Asians more generally) can't be understood without examining everything from class, gender, race, sexuality, profession, and place. Similarly, belonging cannot be understood within a mono-nationalist framework and, more importantly, should move beyond, beneath, across, and around the hegemony of the "nation." Only then can we understand the politics of struggle around cultural citizenship in the contemporary United States.
I believe that we need to reexamine migration through the codes of online media. The conditions of transnational migration and network communication seem to offer up similar questions about the ontology of reality, materiality, and emplacement. Online media and diaspora are viewed as particularly compatible given their homologous relationship to deterritorialization, dispersal, virtuality, time-space compression, and transnational mobility. Decentralized circuits of production, distribution, and consumption as well as the "world wide" reach of the Web have factored into the conceptualization of the online as a globally accessible network space that transcends the limitations of place, geography, and synchronous time-space.
The emergence of studies of "digital diasporas" in recent years speaks simultaneously to the increasing investment within academia to understand the intersections between online cultures and diasporic spaces as well as the growing awareness to complicate the association by unpacking both "digital" and "diaspora." As online media have transformed the modes as well as the meaning around travel, mobility, and place, the narrative of searching for a national home, "in both its liberatory and repressive senses," as Ella Shohat put it, is still very much present in the midst of transnational and dispersed identities. However, even as we track the continued significance of the national for digital diasporas, we must also recognize the presence and play of multiple other factors that shape how online media matter to transnational communities. With regard to South Asians online, as Radhika Gajjala and Venkataramana Gajjala note, language, caste, and religion, for instance, complicate the debates over access and computer literary. Further, as Rachel Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong remind us, while it is very seductive to buy into the possibilities of virtual, especially the possibility of transcending the limitation of the "real" world, we must remain very "skeptical of the erasure of a category such as race via the technologies and conceptualizations of the virtual."
The varied and overlapping concerns of online remediation of "home" through the concept of the homepage, the reframing by immigrant communities of the nationalist logics organizing "original" and "current" homelands, and the multisited nature of belonging in the household, on the street, in the workplace, in a community, locally, nationally, or transnationally call for an interdisciplinary approach that engages with the multiple contingent pathways of belonging. Therefore, instead of fitting my study of Indian immigrants and their online cultures into the category of "digital diaspora," I purposely press my research against the contours drawn by the notion of a virtualized diaspora and seek to mark the sites of tension, rupture, and reconfiguration. As Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy have noted, identities and cultures are constantly changing and shifting; they are mobile and open to negotiation within emergent frameworks. Addressing the gaps between our current theorization around immigrant cultures online and the shifting practices governing and shaping the relations between transnational communities and online networks can help us expand our understanding of some of the key issues with which this book is centrally concerned: the transnational logics of web entrepreneurism and the politics of race, class, gender, and nationalism in mediating online belonging and exclusion for immigrants.
A Critical Take on the Silicon Indian
While the term Silicon Indian locates the immigrant within California's Silicon Valley, I use the term more fluidly to indicate the confluence of a particular conceptualization of Indian-ness with that of science and technology. This figure was fashioned most intensely during the 1990s, when shifts in the technological, political, and capital investments of the Indian and American nation-states brought about more dynamic exchanges between a variety of actors in the domains of computing, software, and information technology. Popular and industry narratives about the information nation-states of America and India have repeatedly hailed the Indian—as software worker or expert, technologically inclined, math and science proficient.
Historically, Indians who migrated after the U.S. reforms of 1965 were often middle-class professionals in the fields of engineering and medicine. In the 1970s and 1980s, Indian presence in the technology domain, especially computing, increased sizably. In the 1990s the figure of the Indian immigrant was sutured to information networks and Silicon Valley in unprecedented ways. While the figure of the Indian American venture capitalist, exemplified through people such as Vinod Dham, Vinod Khosla, and Kanwal Rekhi, began to occupy a key space in the reconfiguring of immigrant identity, the emergence of the H-1B Indian "techie," following the creation of the H-1B visa category in 1990, furthered the vision of this community as a middle-class, web-savvy, networked group. As the following example reveals, the emergent narratives about Indian immigrants and digital technologies hinged on exemplary success stories to spread a mythology of male technological prowess.
In February 1998, Little India, a popular Indian American monthly magazine published on the East Coast of the United States, released an Internet directory with more than two thousand listings for the Indian American community, noting "not only is this the first such directory for the Indian community, we dare say it is among the first specialized community directories of its kind, period." Published at a time when, by most accounts, e-commerce was booming in the United States, Little India's Internet directory was reproducing an annual tradition of the magazine, which was to offer a directory of Indian American businesses, but this time with a crucial difference. For its 1998 issue, Little India shifted the focus from the brick and mortar model of community businesses and organizations to the e-commerce model. Prior to publication, the magazine featured the following call for directory listings on several India-related online bulletin boards and chat groups: "If your business has an internet presence, either through homepages, email access, or because it is a computer/internet related business, this is your opportunity to stand out and truly benefit from your cutting edge advantage among the most computer and internet literate ethnic group in the United States."
When the directory was published in its February 1998 issue, the editorial—fittingly titled, "Grasping the Future"—laid out its vision of the unique location of Indian Americans in the emergent network economy and its implications for the community's sense of identity and power in the unfolding age of online media. As the world is "on the cusp of a momentous economic paradigm shift," the editorial notes, Indian Americans are "especially well positioned to reap the rewards of the emerging information revolution." Among the reasons listed include, most notably, the fact that Indian Americans have "the highest proportion of computer professionals of all U.S. ethnic groups" (the editors suggested that the representation of Indians in the computer sector was ten times the U.S. national average). However, beyond computer literacy, it was the community's "exceptionally high educational attainment," according to the editorial, that made Indian Americans uniquely advantaged among all immigrant groups in the United States. To substantiate the point, the editorial deployed statistical data: "nearly 66 percent of Indian men and 50 percent of Indian women have bachelor's degrees, compared to a national average of 23 and 18 percent respectively," and "almost 4 in 10 Indians hold a master's or higher degree and 7 percent have a doctorate, both several times the national average." Hence, the editors remark, given the twin factors of high levels of education and numerical and technological strength in the sectors of computing and networking, it is hardly surprising that "India and Indian Americans are exceedingly well represented on the web." By way of "grasping the future," the editors opine that while the Internet will in all likelihood be a "high stakes poker game with a handful of winners and many losers," it is the "the technologically savvy [who] will hold all the cards." In a community where even the "computer illiterate ... hold a vital key to the door of the information society" (by virtue of being highly educated), the editors hoped that the directory "will serve to accelerate the adoption of the Internet," thereby giving Indian Americans "an enviable winning hand."
The editorial employs the figure of Sabeer Bhatia as a "remarkable story of Indian immigrants," who along with Bill Gates and other "high tech moguls," are taking "center stage" in a U.S. economy where "already the Fords and General Motors of American [sic] have been relegated to the sidelines." Bhatia, who moved from Bangalore to California in 1988 as a nineteen-year-old graduate student, created Hotmail, the email service company, in 1996. He reportedly built its user base at a record rate of 125,000 new members a day for the next two years. This phenomenal growth led the media pundits at celebrated technology magazine Wired to note that Hotmail was growing "faster than any media company in history—faster than CNN, faster than America Online, faster even than the audience grew for Seinfeld." Hotmail was subsequently acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for $400 million. Little India's editorial referring to the very same development describes it as "the stuff on which egalitarian legends are based [where] in truth, Bhatia, and Gates before him, second only the first notes in a symphony that is transforming the global economic order."
Appearing two years before the dot-com crash of 2000, Little India's editorial offers an insight into a dominant narrative about Indian immigrants in the United States, coming of age via their technological expertise. It is a narrative that imagines Indian Americans as a model minority in the information age, where through individual enterprise, education, and skill Indian Americans refashion themselves as web entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and, to quote Little India, "egalitarian legends." It is worthwhile to note that Sabeer Bhatia, in many ways a rare and outstanding example of entrepreneurial success in Silicon Valley, is the figure who frames the presentation of the Internet directory, which essentially is a list of websites catering to the Indian American community that were included by virtue of an application form and payment of a fee. The Little India editorial, which connects the unprecedented success in the entrepreneurial domain of online technologies to Indian male immigrant skills, is a very significant text. It points to a cultural transformation in the late 1990s and early 2000s, one that is in many crucial respects still ongoing.
Following the dot-com crash of 2000, the Silicon Indian migrated within the United States, finding a home in resurgent software industry nodes such as Silicon Alley in New York and emergent ones such as Silicon Hills in Austin, Texas. At the same time, India adopted an IT vision for reimaging the nation and its location on the global stage, and regional states began recasting their capital cities as IT hubs. While the city of Bangalore in Southern India had been called India's Silicon Valley in the late 1980s, its position was increasingly consolidated beginning in the 1990s. India's Silicon Valley, however, also had to share its limelight with emergent IT hubs such as Chennai and Hyderabad (also sometimes called Cyberabad). The changes in the Indian national and regional scene were often reliant on networking with as well as the investment of Silicon Indians in the United States, who are a key target of India's efforts to involve its diasporic population in the national economy. A related and interesting development during the 2000s is that the image of the Silicon Indian slowly transformed into a state of mind, an attitude that believes in the enduring power of technology to bring about development and progress. This transformation is exemplified by Chidanand Rajghatta's book The Horse That Flew: How India's Silicon Gurus Spread Their Wings, which references some provocative interpretations, such as the idea that India's tradition of philosophic inquiry steeped in Vedic Hindu religion makes Indians intellectually predisposed to be good at computer science and info-technologies.
There are two major implications for the figure of the Silicon Indian in narratives such as Rajghatta's. First, the Silicon Indian is imagined as a Hindu male, technological expert, and the Indian nation is writ large on the body of the Silicon Indian and his Indian American networks. Second, in the figure of the Silicon Indian, ideologies of race are critical (along with class, masculinity, and religion) to the efforts to manage and consolidate the hegemonic boundaries of the nation-state—both Indian and American. As discussed in the "links" of the following section, race is implicated within the overlapping relations of class and gender in the production of technology-related stories about Silicon Indians. Race is a key factor that often gets elided in discussions of Indian immigrants and the Indian diaspora online. In the next section, using the concept of curry—the group of spices at the heart of Indian cuisine—I demonstrate how Indian immigrants in the IT field experience both a sense of belonging and a reminder of their outsider status through the raced and sensorial metaphor of curry. I suggest that curry is a code: for the American mainstream to hint at how Indian immigrants are different (as in "curry people" and "curry-smelling IT workers"), and for techno-elites within the immigrant community to appropriate cultural difference as cultural pride by (as in "curry brigade" and "curry rock music").
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Virtual Homelands by Madhavi Mallapragada. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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