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Between India and the United States: Repositioning
Diasporic Media and Desi Culture
Over the past two decades, media scholars have built on the work of social
theorists including Arjun Appadurai and Stuart Hall to provide us with a
rich vocabulary and set of tools to analyze the relationship between media
5
and migration. In this scholarship, diaspora and diasporic media produc-
tion have been privileged sites for understanding the shifting, often disjunc-
tive, relations between cultural production, geography, and identity. Further,
in the South Asian context, it is possible to now trace an arc beginning with
Marie Gillespie’s analysis of media use in a predominantly Punjabi com-
munity in a London neighborhood, through Sunaina Maira’s exploration of
Indian American youth culture in New York City, to Shalini Shankar’s eth-
nography of Desi youth culture during the tech boom in Silicon Valley as a
way to foreground transformations in understandings of South Asian dia-
sporic identity and the South Asian mediascape. 6
Where Gillespie documented the creative and strategic ways in which
youth in diasporic communities drew on media and popular culture to initi-
ate dialogues between their parents’ ideas of culture and their experiences
in British society, Maira illustrated how a range of media (from mainstream
Indian films to subcultural remix music) functioned as triggers for discus-
sions and contests over broader issues of ethnic authenticity and cultural
hybridity, assimilation and race relations, multiculturalism and citizen-
ship. While these issues remain deeply relevant in the lives of Desi teenag-
ers that Shankar documents and analyzes, her ethnography also illustrates
the extent to which being and becoming Desi has changed as South Asians
from diverse class, linguistic, religious, and geographic backgrounds have
established themselves in places like California. Arguing that it is no lon-
ger productive to characterize second-generation youth as being “culturally
and intergenerationally conflicted”—of being “American” at school, “Indian”
at home, and “caught in limbo” between these two worlds—Shankar asserts
that Desi youth now “exhibit a far more nuanced consciousness about what
it means to be Desi.” As we will see, the heterogeneity of Desi youth culture
7
that scholars like Shankar foreground poses a formidable challenge to media
industry professionals’ efforts to forge a Desi demographic.
Further, where the South Asian diaspora is concerned, popular and schol-
arly accounts have tended to privilege cinema, Hindi-language films from
Bombay and English-language diasporic films in particular, over print,
television, and other forms of cultural production. While one could argue
that this provides too narrow a template for understanding the relationship