5/4/19
ASA 141
Week 6: It's Hip to Be Asian
This week I decided to focus my response on Parminder Bhachu's "It's Hip to be Asian." This article really spoke to my experience with how my culture is received, as she talked about how salwar-kameez or Punjabi suits/"suits" were received by the UK throughout different time periods. The presence of suits was first perceived as lower class, but then as the white members of society started to adopt the fashion, it was seen as higher class. Bhachu's interpretation of this was very neutral, almost positively seeing how diaspora changed throughout time and how cultures started to mix. This was especially seen by how she described indo-western versions of the suits. However, I think she did not address the fact that this could be seen as milder cultural appropriation of a beautiful piece of cultural clothing. The cultural appropriation extends further into aspects of life such as food, with the appearance of "curry" that you can just throw into any type of food and "currify" it. There's so many different types of curry, from wet to dry to cream to more vegetable based to meat based to different powders and completely different spices, that this definitely has hints of appropriation. However, I also see how diaspora and mixing of cultures is healthy for a population. I wonder, how can England balance the diaspora of Indian culture with their own society, especially with their history of how they treated India in the past?
Figure 1: A picture of a high fashion or "indo-western" salwar-kameez is on the left, and on the right we have a more authentic anarkali style suit on the right.
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