Of Silk Saris and Mini-Skirts

Abstract

Using articles from Canadian mainstream media, discussions with Canada’s South Asian community, and interviews with young second-generation South Asian women about their relationships with school and family during the early to mid-1990s, Handa sets out to contest the dominant culture clash model that has been used to explain how South Asian adolescents are “torn” or “caught” between the values of “traditional” (South Asian) and “modern” (Canadian) culture. Handa argues, ... that women and youth have become symbols of the sets of values that are seen to be in need of protection from the process of modern social progress … certain notions of women and youth are mobilized in order to maintain and assert specific notions of identity and belonging. (p. 19) Also, she points out that “South Asian cultural identities rely on particular definitions of womanhood in order to assert a distinct Eastern identity visà- vis the West” (p. 19). The book is organized into seven chapters. The first chapter situates the central issues and questions she raises in her book amidst recollections of her past experiences in Canada and her reflections on present-day changes in Canada’s South Asian community. The bulk of this chapter focuses on critiquing the dominant “culture clash” model in an effort to underscore its inadequacies. This critique hinges primarily on theoretical discussions of culture and identity, which become the theoretical framework for her work. In the following five chapters, the author shares her findings, analyses, and arguments. Each chapter focuses on developing one particular aspect of her central argument, although many common subtexts and themes thread their way through them. Some of the main themes and subtexts are the invisibility of whiteness in relation to the ethnicity of browness; the centrality of a white Canadian identity and the maintenance of white power and privilege; and the positioning of young South Asian women by discourses of East/West, modern/traditional, and brown/white, as well as their continuous negotiation of identities. In the last chapter, Handa plants the seeds of possibility for a collective political voice of opposition to racism built on black and South Asian diasporic voices ...