Please join us for the first LVC of the year this Friday, Oct. 21 from 15:30-17:00 in Rosenwald 301. Akshay Aitha will be presenting on identity among people of Telugu heritage in America.

“Erasure and emergence: How Telugu-ness has evolved in the American diaspora”

While caste, religion, and region are among the most important axes of differentiation (Gal and Irvine 2019) in Indian society, it is race which is the most salient type of social categorization in the American context. I consider the question of racial identity formation for American-raised Telugu people in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a cultural milieu where there is no notion (hegemonically-imposed or not) of `Telugu-ness’ and `South Asian’ is often assumed to be a monolithic category, how do second-generation Telugu-Americans understand their relationship to being Telugu and speaking Telugu? I find that while this population tends to use at least some Telugu at home and to be strongly aware that they are in fact Telugu, their racial praxis tends to be more generally South Asian-American. Especially outside the home context, relevant distinctions within the South Asian-American umbrella are no longer about caste, religion, or region: instead,  the relevant splits reflect the racial categorizations seen in the wider American context. For example, the White-POC split resurfaces as an `Americanized-Non-Americanized’ distinction. Thus, while speaking Telugu is clearly very important to many American-raised Telugu people in the Bay Area, the relevant axes of differentiation around Telugu-ness in India have been erased in favor of new ones more relevant in the US.