South Asian American Visual Culture And Representation

Authors

Bakirathi Mani, Swarthmore CollegeFollow

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2018

Published In

The Oxford Encyclopedia Of Asian American Literature And Culture

Abstract

South Asian American visual culture is a diverse field of visual art, created by artists who are first-, second- and third-generation immigrants from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, among other diasporic locations (e.g., Kenya). South Asian American artists work in a range of media forms, including photography, sculpture, installation, video, painting, and drawing. Collectively, these artworks are frequently exhibited in museums and galleries as depictions of contemporary South Asian immigrant life. However, a close reading of individual works produces a more dynamic picture. Instead of viewing South Asian American visual culture solely in terms of artists’ own immigrant biographies, scholarship and museum practices have begun to focus on how its aesthetic and political contributions have been central to the representation of racialized, gendered, and sexualized immigrant bodies in the United States since the turn of the millennium. Drawing across archival collections, aesthetic histories, and digital media forms, artists create works that link the colonial documentation of “native” bodies on the subcontinent with the surveillance and documentation of immigrant bodies by the US state. Alongside artists, academics and activists also work to produce curatorial interventions through exhibitions that generate feminist and queer critiques of the relation between nation-state and diaspora. Emphasizing the transnational ties of capital and labor that bind together the subcontinent with the United States, South Asian American visual culture creates new frameworks for the relationship between race, visuality, and representation.

Keywords

race, representation, visual culture, transnational, queer, feminist, South Asian American, diaspora

Published By

Oxford University Press

Editor(s)

J. Lee

Comments

This material was originally published in The Oxford Encyclopedia Of Asian American Literature And Culture edited by Josephine Lee, and has been reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. For permission to reuse this material, please visit http://global.oup.com/academic/rights.

Recommended Citation

Bakirathi Mani. (2018). "South Asian American Visual Culture And Representation". The Oxford Encyclopedia Of Asian American Literature And Culture. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.899
https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-english-lit/381