This past weekend marked the commencement of the 21st annual South Asian Awareness Network conference, or SAANference. This year’s theme was “Beyond Borders: Confronting Division and Forging Unity” — aimed at facing the existing “borders” and divisions that penetrate the South Asian diaspora. Speakers and participants spent the weekend identifying these “borders” and drawing upon the divisions between South Asian communities that often lead to deep-rooted cleavages. SAANference chose to bridge such gaps by bringing to light topics such as gender-based violence, anti-capitalism in the South Asian community and the curation of South Asian history.
The 2023 conference started off Friday with keynote speaker Nadia Ahmad, an associate law professor at Barry University and environmental justice advocate. Prof. Ahmad opened up the conference with a topic that truly encapsulated the urgency to move dialogues beyond “borders” by discussing the prevalence of environmental injustice and the necessity for global solidarity. She had attempted to discuss the 2022 floodings in Pakistan at a previous conference and found the experience particularly emotionally draining due to her personal connection and the lack of understanding from her audience.
“I found myself crying because I was in a room with nobody that looks like me, and they just didn’t get it,” Ahmad said.
In an interview after her speech, she touched on the importance of the SAANference theme. Prof. Ahmad called for solidarity within South Asia to tackle the issue of climate change in light of socioeconomically disadvantaged groups being impacted severely by these crises.
“Moving beyond borders is especially important when specific populations bear the brunt of these crises,” Ahmad said.
Participants, families, SAAN members and speakers all gathered for lunch in Angell Hall on Saturday for Day 2 of the conference. After a meal full of South Asian dishes, participants were split into two different “tracks” so different groups could experience different speakers and workshops. Workshops included discussing topics ranging from South Asian gender-based violence to Anti-Blackness in the South Asian community.
Our first workshop was with Amrita Doshi and Nashi Gunasekara from South Asian Allies Rising (SOAR), an organization founded by South Asian women around two years ago to tackle gender-based violence. Their workshop began with a clip from “Bend it Like Beckham,” a movie that was one of the first South Asian representations we saw in Western media. This clip portrayed a Punjabi family much like my own, albeit slightly exaggerated with outdated dialogue. After watching the clip, participants were asked to identify all the South Asian cultural norms they saw. Surprisingly, we identified around 30 stereotypes within the short three-minute clip relating to colorism, sexism and divorce stigma.
When asked about how such cultural norms interact with their own forms of parenting, parents contemplated whether or not they have truly abandoned these stigmas. A mother in the audience who had identified divorce stigma as a topic from the clip said, “I can’t imagine carrying the pressure of being a divorcee for myself, so how could I want that for my daughter?”
Doshi and Gunasekara deconstructed the discussion of the clip and prompted the audience to explore how such cultural norms create obstacles in our community when tackling gender-based violence.
“A recent study in the New York state region found that 85% of South Asians aged 18-34 have experienced some form of sexual assault,” said Gunasekara. “Someone next to you right now may be included in that especially if you consider underreporting.”
As Doshi and Gunasekara discussed this statistic, the audience fell silent and everyone glanced at each other, startled by the observation that had just been brought up. The speakers then called for action and went through various long-term non-carceral solutions for gender-based violence that their organization is exploring. At the end of their presentation, Doshi prompted the audience to imagine what our community would like with these changes.
“If you can imagine that community in your minds, then that image is something we can create together,” Doshi stated.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily after the presentation, Doshi and Gunasekara brought the topic of gender-based violence back to the SAANference theme.
Doshi and Gunasekara touched on an idea that would continuously be brought up by other speakers. Borders aren’t just the physical lines we see, but also the barriers that we socially construct together. Doshi said that “borders are also barriers, and when we look at gender-based violence, we see barriers across the whole field: cultural barriers, systemic barriers, barriers across conversations and behaviors.”
Manan Desai, an associate professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan initiated the second workshop of the day about “recovering South Asian American Histories.” Prof. Desai has spoken at various SAAN conferences in the past. Desai attended his first SAAN conference in 2005 as an undergraduate student at the University.
He spoke on his journey in building archival research for South Asian history with the South Asian American Digital Archive. After speaking to multiple challenges and barriers in creating archival resources, Desai touched on two important projects his team developed. The Roadtrips project and Our Stories textbook were the culmination of efforts to surpass barriers in curating South Asian history. Desai pushed the audience to think about how we are represented in history and in our educational settings.
Rajika Bhandari, an expert on international higher education and author of the memoir “America Calling: A Foreign Student in a Country of Possibility,” continued the conversation of barriers within the space of education through her workshop “Different Journeys, Shared Experiences: South Asian International and Immigrant Students.” She finds the topic of international students especially relevant to the South Asian community since Indian students are the second largest group of international students in the U.S. When exploring the more general theme of borders and barriers, Bandari said, “I was pushed to think about the divides and silos we create between two different communities on a campus.” These two groups are immigrant South Asian students and South Asian American students. Bandari explored the shared experiences and differences between these two groups in her workshop, concluding that the “one true barrier is immigration.”
Bandari explored the ways in which immigrant students congregate and the divisions within our diaspora. When she asked her audience if anyone was an international student, there was only one individual who raised their hand.
She looked at her audience and asked, “On a campus with these many international students and at a conference meant for South Asians I wonder where those students are?”
The last speaker of the day was Sangay Mishra, an associate professor at Drew University who explored the concepts of race, religion and belonging within the South Asian diaspora in post-9/11 America. Prof. Mishra’s talk was unique in that he examined the many distinct narratives that encompass the overarching Asian American experience. For instance, he showed us a survey that reflected whom the American public considers “Asian” or “Asian American.” Strangely enough, there was a stark difference in proportions: many perceived Japanese people, Chinese people and Koreans to be Asian American, while much fewer viewed Pakistanis and Indians as such.
With American society vilifying Muslims after the 9/11 attacks, the Asian American diaspora was left with deep fissures instead of unified mobility. Prof. Mishra compared instances of racial lumping of Muslims after 9/11 to the case of Vincent Chen — a Chinese American worker killed in a racially motivated assault in 1982 — to question whether racialization can really lead to group unification on a larger scale. Prof. Mishra’s research highlighted voting as a point at which Asian Americans converge. This group forms one of the largest demographics voting in favor of Democrats, a trend that highlights political mobilization as a form of solidarity within the larger Asian American diaspora.
When asked about which types of solidarity he believes to be most valuable in addressing and tackling these divisions, Prof. Mishra stated that “all these problems require different identifications,” and that “broad-based solidarity that is inclusive of all these identities” is essential. I found it fascinating to compare the interesting paradox of internal cleavages — such as religion, national origin, language, and caste — to Prof. ] Mishra’s notion of unified ethnoracial mobilization.
Within our facilitation workshops, we began to unravel the distinct divisions that South Asian Americans are made to confront — many of which we didn’t realize we dealt with until this discussion. Someone brought up the ways in which he, as an Indian, tends to simplify his name for Starbucks baristas. Another girl spoke of the rare instances of excitement as a child when she would see a name resembling her own in school textbooks. A father recalled being stereotyped as either a “techie” or a “taxi driver” when moving between Canada and the U.S. By the end of the workshops, we were able to recognize and openly tackle the unique difficulties South Asian Americans confront in a society ridden with misinformed stereotypes and a lack of representation. It was a reminder that histories of exclusion can also be what bind the Asian American diaspora in solidarity.
MiC Assistant Editor Shania Baweja can be reached at shaniab@umich.edu. MiC Columnist Nuraiya Malik can be reached at nuraiya@umich.edu.