Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States by Monisha Das Gupta

Author:Monisha Das Gupta [Gupta, Monisha Das]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Immigration, Non-Fiction, Politics, Social Science
ISBN: 9780822388173
Google: e1nSfsMRkFcC
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2006-10-09T23:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Manavi, Sakhi, and SAWA are the Combahee River Collectives of the present day. In a 1977 statement, the collective called out to black women to “look deeply into our own experiences, and from sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression” (Combahee River Collective 1983, 212). A similar urgency animated the founders of Manavi, Sakhi, and SAWA to create spaces where none existed so that South Asian immigrant women could become politicized, act on their politics, and envision a full life for themselves and their families, communities, and political comrades.

These three women’s organizations offer the most clear and compelling account of how nation and race intersect in the bodies of “immigrant women.” They explicate the complicated ways in which these women are racialized on the basis of their cultural and legal status as outsiders to the United States. Racism, as experienced by immigrant women, is intrinsically tied to who is allowed to belong to that nation and who is not and under what conditions. Thus, these organizations have produced understandings of racism that U.S. black feminism and other anti-racist movements need to incorporate in their struggles. These organizations open up new methods through which racism and a racialist state can be fought. To situate South Asian women activists as producers of anti-racist knowledge moves away from the idea presented in Vijay Prashad’s work (2000) that South Asians have to catch up with the anti-racist struggles of other people of color in the United States. Sections within South Asian immigrant communities—in this case women’s organizations—are along with Chicana and Native American women engaged in developing critiques of the power of the nation in constructing racialized, gendered others (see, e.g., Guerrero 1997).18

The three groups, through their redefinitions of domestic violence, advance our understanding of the intersecting systems that devalue women and unleash the violence that women experience. In turn, the redefinitions raise questions about the efficacy of the work against domestic violence such as shelters, one-to-one counseling, support groups, legal help, police protection, and personal empowerment (see Arnold 1995, 279; Reinelt 1995, 88). Are these tools adequate or even appropriate to use in combating the many forms of oppression that the redefinitions reveal? Women of color have long struggled against the white-dominated domestic violence movement’s inability to address the convergence of race, class, and gender in the lives of minority survivors. In this context, Kimberlé Crenshaw correctly argues that by “adopting policies, priorities, or strategies of empowerment that elide or wholly disregard the particular intersectional needs of women of color” (1995, 364) the movement ends up subordinating these women instead of empowering them. These very elisions and exclusions necessitated that Manavi, Sakhi, and SAWA overhaul the understandings of domestic violence with which they had started. Manavi was compelled to develop an alternative to the domestic violence movement’s model of independent living when it connected the abuse that immigrant women face at home with the many types of violence they are exposed to in the public sphere.

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