Where is the South Asian in Asian American Studies?

                Jordache’s presentation that looked at Indians and South Africa and Kandice Chuh’s Introduction to Imagine Otherwise made me consider the absence of South Asians in our discourse of Asian American Studies.  I began to wonder, “Where is the presence of South Asians in Asian American Studies?”  I wondered if their exclusion from the exclusion was atypical or typical.  The term South Asian includes people from these countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lankan (http://eslibrary.berkeley.edu/asian-american-studies-collection). Thinking back on our course readings I realized an absence of Asian Indian literature, however, I remembered our introduction to the exclusions faced by Asians in America, and there is a brief mention of Asian Indians in Sucheng Chan’s chapter “The International Context of Asian Emigration” in her book Asian Americans. In my own experience with Asian Americans through Ethnic Studies in undergrad I also found a lack of South Asians in the discourse of Asian Americans. 

                In Chuh’s Introduction to Imagine Otherwise she explores what is meant by the term Asian American.  She sees the term Asian American as a homogenizing term that erases or belittles the diversity among different “Asian” groups (21).  In deconstructing the term Asian American Chuh focuses largely on the division in study of Asian Americans that seems split between activism and academics.  She later talks about the term Asian American as a representational sign saying, “’Asian American’ in this regard connotes the violence, exclusion, dislocation, and disenfranchisement that has attend the codification of certain bodies as, variously, Oriental, yellow, sometimes brown, inscrutable, devious, always alien” (27, emphasis added). I found this particular passage curious as it alludes to the lack of brownness in the term Asian American.  In looking up definitions of Asian Americans, South Asians seem to be a part of the definition although I have rarely seen their inclusion in Asian American Studies.

                I took to the internet to look at Asian American Studies programs to see if they included South Asians in their studies of Asian Americans, essentially I was looking for who they included in their definition of Asian Americans.  Many of the programs I saw included South Asians in their definitions of Asian Americans, but their faculty often didn’t include many people of South Asian descent while there was a disproportionate representation of faculty of Chinese and Japanese descent (at least among the California schools I happened to look at) and to a lesser extent faculty of Korean and Filipino descent.  While this is not necessarily a scientific or statistical finding, it is an observation I made. I wonder is there a space in Asian American Studies for their voices to be heard?