Prema Kurien

Gendered ethnicity: Creating a Hindu Indian identity in the United States

Based on a study of three Hindu Indian religio-cultural organizations whose members live in and around a metropolitan area in California, this article examines the central role played by gender in the creation of ethnic communities and cultures among Hindu Indian immigrants. Gender relations and constructs are reworked during the course of immigration and settlement and are crucial to the Hindu American ethnicity developed in the United States. The author argues that migration and settlement result in an interrelated but distinct sequence of gendered processes at three analytical levels—the household, the local ethnic community, and the pan-Indian umbrella organizations. The processes occurring at the three levels intermesh in a complicated and contradictory dynamic. The contradictions are manifested in the construction of gendered ethnicity and in gender practice, particularly at the organizational level.

Being Young, Brown, and Hindu The Identity Struggles of Second-Generation Indian Americans

The “new second generation,” the children of post-1965 immigrants, is the focus of scholars who recognize that it is the critical generation who will determine the future patterns of race and ethnicity in the United States. Based on a case study of a Hindu Student Council chapter at “Western University” in California, this article looks at how the attempts by second-generation Indian Americans to deal with issues of race brought many of them to the organization but also produced conflicts and cleavages within it. The purpose of my analysis is to argue that religious institutions often play a crucial role in the identity construction of new Americans and that the complex interplay between race, ethnicity, and religion has been ignored by the dominant sociological models of immigrant incorporation. I also show how and why conventional American categories of race and ethnicity are often inadequate for understanding the experiences of contemporary immigrants and their children.

Colonialism and ethnogenesis: A study of Kerala, India

Although pre-colonial Kerala was socially stratified, society was organized into a system of interdependent castes and religious groups, each with a particular social, economic, and ritual role and position in the larger order. My argument is that over the period of colonialism, the global and systemic character of the social structure and most of the earlier ties of dependency that bound the groups together were dissolved, and each of the units of the system began to develop autonomous ethnic identities. Ethnic formation was the consequence of the economic and political compulsions of colonial rule. I conceptualize the process of colonialism as having consisted of two phases with the concomitant social consequences being very different for each phase. In the first phase, existing social arrangements were harnessed to the exigencies of revenue generation and political control. In the process there was an increase in the exploitation of the lower strata and an empowerment of the elites. A combination of factors initiated the process of ethnicization among the laboring groups and among the displaced elites. In the second, capitalistic phase, the compulsions of a market economy and a moder state necessitated the overthrow of the traditional stratification system. The displacement of groups from their socioeconomic niches, together with the introduction of new resources into the society, carried forward the process of ethnic formation and mobilization.

Introduction: the impact of immigrants on American institutions

Looks at how immigration in the USA has changed so that by the late 1980s almost three‐quarters of a million legal immigrants were entering the country ever year, and how by the 1980s this had increased to 9 million! Investigates the changing birthrate by which foreign born residents now account for one in five births in the USA. Posits that Islam is the fastest growing religion and that the USA has metamorphosed from being a “Christian” country to be the most religiously diverse nation in the world.

Opposing constructions and agendas: The politics of Hindu and Muslim Indian-American organizations

1. International migration and the globalization of domestic politics: a conceptual framework 2. Immigrant organizations and the globalization of Turkeys domestic politics 3. Mobilizing ethnic conflict: Kurdish separatism in Germany and the PKK 4. Israelis in a Jewish diaspora: the dilemmas of a globalized group 5. Migrant membership as an instituted process: transnationalization, the state and the extra-territorial conduct of mexican politics 6. Politics from outside: Chinese overseas and political and economic change in China 7. Opposing constructions and agendas: the politics of Hindu and Indian American organizations 8. A marooned diaspora: ethnic Russians in the Near Abroad and their impact on Russias foreign policy and domestic politics

Race, religion, and the political incorporation of Indian Americans

Abstract This paper examines the logic underlying three different patterns of Indian American political mobilization and presents a theoretical examination of how race and religion interact to shape the political incorporation of contemporary immigrants. Indian Americans are becoming politically active around homeland and domestic issues. What is particularly striking about this group is that they have mobilized around a variety of identities in an attempt to influence United States policy. Some identify as Indian Americans, others as South Asian Americans, and yet others on the basis of their religious background as Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians. There is also an adult, second-generation population that is getting involved in civic and political activism in very different ways from their parents’ generation. My research focused on a variety of Indian American advocacy organizations and found that differing understandings of race, as well as majority/minority religious status in the United States and in India, played important roles in producing variations in their patterns of civic and political activism. I argue that these activism patterns can be explained by the ways in which race and religion intertwine with the characteristics of groups and political opportunity structures in the United States.

Negotiating Ethnicity: Second-Generation South Asian Americans Traverse a Transnational WorldNegotiating Ethnicity: Second-Generation South Asian Americans Traverse a Transnational World, by PurkayasthaBandana. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 220 pp.

policy recommendations for improving the reprehensible condition of the Brazilian disadvantaged. This book would have benefited from some additional editing (e.g., several inconsistent statistics, repeated sections, and some tables without sources). Despite this minor quibble, the author makes a major contribution to the understanding of race relations, making this book required reading for anyone interested in the topics of race or Brazil.

23.95 paper. ISBN: 0813535824.

Tables Introduction Some Major Muslim Organizations in the United States Muslim Integration Gender Issues and Relations African-American Muslims Conclusion Selected Bibliography Index

Competing Visions of Islam in the United States: A Study of Los Angeles

This collection of essays focuses on a large segment of unskilled labourers in Indian society who have failed to manage regular and protected employment in the rapidly expanding towns and cities of Third World countries. Based on empirical research over two decades in a small town of south Gujarat, the author discusses and then rejects some of the standard notions regarding the origin, size, shape and growth of this sector of the Indian population.