Hilal Nakiboglu: Understanding ethnic identity

Last Friday, I was one of many who watched the South Asia Society's Spring Show. I bought my ticket on Locust Walk just days after seeing the predominantly Indian-American dance troupe PENNaach perform. Although my official line for both shows was that I had come in support of my participant Hill House residents, secretly I knew I was there for a reason much more selfish. I will come clean now and announce that I am a closet fan of all things Bollywood -- the glitzy Indian (roughly) equivalent of Hollywood. I have been since the ninth grade, when my parents came to own a satellite dish. Through it, I discovered the South Asian answer to MTV, something called Zee TV. It couldn't have been anything but love at first sight, really. The lure of charged, highly spirited dance sequences, colorful, fantastic costumes made wet thanks to the effects of strategic rainfall and the gyrating men with their fluid hair, was certainly too great for a girl in high school to resist. I spent a good deal of my free time memorizing the words to Hindi love songs. Important to note -- I don't actually know Hindi. Much to the confused frustration of my parents, I would sing things like "Ho... ek la dakii ko dekhaa to aisaa lagaa ek la" loudly in the shower. They chalked it up to teen rebellion and left it alone. Once in college, I became a member of the Indian Students' Association. It seemed somehow natural for me to do so. I didn't think twice about it. Oddly, perhaps, the fact that I wasn't South Asian seemed unimportant to me. I felt very much included over the course of my three-year association with the group. With time, thankfully, I was taught to look beyond the gloss of Bollywood in my appreciation of South Asian culture. Last weekend, sitting through the SAS show, I found myself reflecting on the nature of student associations that connect people based upon a shared sense of "ethnic identity." Why does an organization like SAS become such a defining, important one for certain college students and not others? Why doesn't Penn have, say, a Scottish-American group for these first generation-ers? Is it an issue of having a "critical volume" of interested students? Or is there something else there? And, importantly, why do groups like SAS take such a strongly performative approach to understanding and expressing their ethnicities? The short answer is, I don't know. But I'm discovering that a good deal of theory exists in an attempt to address questions much like these. Asian American Studies scholar K.I. Leonard, for instance, argues that this generation of U.S.-socialized Indian Americans collectively demonstrates what is called a situational, or symbolic, ethnic identity through organizations like SAS. Research she has done suggests that Indian-American kids will initially gravitate toward American culture, but starting in late adolescence, begin increasingly to explore South Asian culture also. Through what Leonard loosely terms an "emotional return," Indian Americans reach out to one another through their shared experiences of, for instance, having "overinvolved, overworried, overprotective" parents. Certainly, it is dangerous to generalize. But it seems college -- although it may mark a new distancing, a new "freedom" from parental influence -- actually becomes a place for these students to rediscover/reorient themselves as, specifically, South Asian Americans. So why is this? It's thought that motivations formative of such ethnic clubs come from two separate sources. First, they come from the students themselves. Second, and critically, they stem from the institution itself. Arriving at a campus like Penn, South Asian students are made very aware of their "differences." In the words of scholar P. Agarwal, they achieve a "shocking realization of their ethnicity." Irrespective of how they see themselves, the college has already pre-defined them as being "Indian." Associating co-ethnically is made easy for these students. Money is channeled into ethnic clubs and associations for them by the school. Joining a group like SAS becomes a natural, accepted, encouraged choice. My friends have argued with me that this is all actually done toward a greater, separatist end for the institution. While there may be some truth to this, a voice keeps me from being angered by it. That voice is the one I heard Friday night at Irvine Auditorium. It is the voice of Ravi Bellur and of Amit Bhattacharjee addressing issues of racism through comedy. It is the voice of Robby Singh Sikka acting out an Indian immigrant father's gradual acceptance of his daughter's hybrid identity. It is the voice of exceptional students, not defying a system but rather, working within it to redefine for themselves, for us all, what it means to be American. Hilal Nakiboglu is a second-year doctoral student in Higher Education Management from Ankara, Turkey.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.