Written into Representation: The South Asian Girl in Cultural Texts
Open AccessThis is a study about stories - single stories that contain representations of model minorities, perpetual foreigners, and other simple frames of references that restrict and erase the complexities that exist in the lives of youth who are from here, there and anywhere in between.Against the backdrop of these single stories, there are other stories like the ones a group of girls of South Asian heritage tell about themselves as influenced by the day to day experiences in their multiple worlds. The girls were first invited to participate as readers of a young adult novel with a protagonist who is South Asian. As readers, they talked back to the representations of Indian American youth, families, and culture contained in the story in a book club inspired ‘Read and Talk’ Club. Following this, they participated in a digital collage project where they took on the role of authors writing themselves as subjects of their representations instead of as objects of other peoples – more powerful – representations. The various positions the girls occupied, reader and author, during the course of this study, allowed them to take on the roles of cultural consumers and producers. This study generated data from three sources: book discussion, digital collage project interviews, and textual analysis of the novels. These were then analyzed using methods that can be best described as a bricolage of analytic approaches drawn from the humanities as well as the social sciences. Finally, the information gleaned from the talk and text analyses was synthesized using Stuart Hall’s theorizing of New Ethnicities, which provided the necessary scaffolding for a nuanced reading of the social processes in the lives of the girls. These processes contain traces of their respective home cultural traditions, language, and practices reflected in the ways they represent themselves and the language they use to describe how they reconcile the way the world sees them with how they see themselves. Their narratives (stories) also reflect a coming to terms with their understanding of themselves as products of several different interlocking histories and cultures. Some of these narratives reflected their ability to code switch, negotiate their multiple identities and feel at home with their difference. The girls’ overall understanding of representations and their self-representations tell us a story. Their narratives (stories) reflect their sense of place, identity, and belonging as they come up against discourses of difference and exclusion in their day-to-day experiences and interactions across multiple spaces and places in their lives that seek to position them at the edge of belonging in their worlds. These are the experiences that influenced the ways in which the girls represented themselves giving rise to themes of living in difference or living through their difference.
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