From Objects to Subjects: Voices, Perspectives, Histories, and Learning in the South Asian American Experience (original) (raw)

Using a postcolonial lens, this paper critiques scholarly discourse on the experiences of South Asian Americans (SAAs) in the United States as being too othering and too homogenized. In most of that discourse, SAAs are treated as objects who may only be reactive to dominant society and culture; their racialized experiences are also muted. Treating SAAs as subjects, this paper presents a way to enrich their experiences, paying particular attention to how those experiences have been racialized. Drawing upon, but also critiquing cultural historical activity theory, the paper presents an alternative way to think about and empirically examine learning. Disciplinary Perspectives and Literature Consulted Using a postcolonial lens, this paper divides the scholarship on the experiences of SAAs 1 into three broad perspectives: historical, historical-materialist, and social-cultural. In this section we briefly describe postcolonial theory and then use it to analyze the three perspectives 2. Postcolonial Theory Postcolonial theory is a dialectic union of Marxism and Poststructuralism that engages the historical condition of postcoloniality to expose the material exploitation and cultural imperialism of colonialism as well as the complicity of the colonized with the colonizer. In so doing, the theory interrogates the bondage of the mind, self, and culture that remains invisible in the aftermath of colonialism; questions and reinterprets the East/West, Orient/Occident divide and modern/traditional binary-with their implication of Western technological and cultural superiority; and critiques "the enduring hierarchies of subjects and knowledges" (Gandhi, 1998, p. 15). All of that is done with the goal of learning from colonialism's past in order to "make, but also to gain, theoretical sense out of that past" (Gandhi, 1998, p. 5).