793192

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CHD0010.1177/0907568218793192ChildhoodDar

Article

Childhood

Performative politics:
1­–15
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0907568218793192
https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568218793192
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Anandini Dar
Ambedkar University Delhi, India

Abstract
This article explores the cultural, youthful, and embodied acts of subject-making of South Asian
immigrant teens growing up in a post 9/11 New York City, wherein they experience Islamophobia
in their neighborhoods and schools. I argue that these acts of subject-making, situated in particular
sociopolitical contexts, and made evident in multiple in-between sites of an after-school center,
street corners, and online forums, can be read as performative politics of youth, and offer insights
into the political agency of young people.

Keywords
Identities, Islamophobia, performativity, political agency, South Asian immigrants, teenagers

Introduction
A group of Desi1 teenagers are hanging around on the corner of Kabab King restaurant, in
Jackson Heights, Queens, New York. Suddenly, music begins to play from loudspeakers on
the street corner and these boys and girls break into a dance performance resembling the
steps in the recently popularized Korean pop song, “Gangnam Style.” A crowd begins to
gather around them, and a “flash mob” ensues, where they perform a tongue-in-cheek, quasi-
choreographed dance to the surprise of onlookers. One minute into the performance, the boys
in the flash mob step to the side and drape a lungi2 over their jeans or trousers, and quickly
re-group while screaming, “Oppan Lungi Style,” instead of the refrain, “Oppan Gangnam
Style,” altering the lyrics and bringing attention to the embodied form of the lungi, as they
quickly wear it mid-dance performance, and to the performative aspect of the lungi, in its
visual and lyrical presentation. The song continues and these teenagers draw further attention
to the lungi, as they yell, “Ae-e-e-ey, sexy lungi,” while the original soundtrack plays, “He-e-
e-ey, sexy lady.”

Corresponding author:
Anandini Dar, School of Education Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi, Lodhi Road Campus, 785 to 761,
Aliganj, BK Dutt Colony, Lodhi Road, New Delhi 110003, India.
Email: anandini@aud.ac.in
2 Childhood 00(0)

This flash mob, retold from my research fieldnotes, took place on Columbus Day in
2012, and it exemplifies what I call, the “performative politics” of South Asian American
and immigrant teenagers. Performative politics here includes the embodied, playful, and
everyday acts of subject-making, which address relations of power. For these desi teens,
the very act of subject-making through performativity, I argue, can be read as political,
particularly in light of the sociocultural and political contexts in which they are growing
up. It was no coincidence that the teens chose Columbus Day to stage their lungi style
dance. Eager for me to witness the performance, they reveled in their ability to make a
public statement that referenced, race, ethnicity, youth, popular culture, and to some
extent, social class, all in one gesture. It was clear, from my vantage point as a researcher
who had spent time with many of these teens that their performative practices expressed
and gave rise to their particular transnational subjectivities, which were deeply linked to
South Asia, embedded as they were in a political context of racism, Islamophobia, and
predominance of an adult hegemonic order.
From 2010–2012, I conducted a multisited ethnography (Holmes and Marcus, 2004;
Marcus, 1995) which began at a youth center for immigrant children and children of
South Asian immigrants, in Queens, New York, and led to my engagements with youth
in other sites too, such as food courts in a mall, subway rides, workshops in Washington,
DC, and rallies in New York city (NYC) on racial justice and South Asian community
mobilizations, as well as their homes and online forums, such as Facebook. Traversing
these various sites with the young people, I came to grasp how desi teen identities and
their resonant political geographies arose in and responded to a post 9/11 climate of
Islamophobia, wherein Arabs, Muslims, and any Brown, South Asian persons found
themselves conflated with extremist terrorists, and thereby subject to everyday racism
and sometimes hate crimes. They found cultural materials at hand with which to speak
back at that world in multiple and varied ways. Drawing on these practices, I argue and
demonstrate below how the subjectivities and political identities of these youth arise in
and through such performativity, and discuss how these playful, youthful, and embodied
practices speak of their transnational cultural locations and political positionings.
South Asian children’s identities and their cultures, like many ethnic and immigrant
populations of the diaspora, have predominantly been studied through the lens of “cul-
ture clash” or assimilation theory, wherein young people are said to feel divided between
their heritage culture and their new culture of the migrant country, as they face pressure
to conform to the host country’s dominant culture (see criticisms: Durham, 1999; Handa,
2003; Maira, 2002; Shankar, 2008). In the past two decades, a few scholars have taken
issue with the clash/assimilation dichotomy, focusing instead on how South Asian teen-
agers develop their “culture, with its own music, social spaces, clothes and a strong sense
of national pride in being diasporic South Asian” (Rajiva, 2009: 78). That is, young
people embrace their multiple subjectivities, producing and performing unique cultural
practices in the diaspora (Hall, 1989, 1990), something often understood as “new ethnici-
ties” or “hybrid” ethnicities.3 Sunaina Maira (2002) finds such youth cultural practices,
in particular transnational cultural practices, in part, as a phenomenon of affiliation with
an ethnic group. Drawing on youth cultural studies, Maira argues that second-generation
South Asian immigrant youth groups in NYC colleges and dance clubs produce a hybrid
sense of “cool” culture that are “mixed with strains of collective nostalgia, and… [they]
Dar 3

perform a deep ambivalence toward ethnicity” (p. 16). Culture for these youth is not
necessarily about “clash” or “assimilation,” rather it is most intimately about ambiva-
lence and performativity in everyday life. Others have discussed South Asian teenage
ethnic groups in schools and homes, and their cultural practices, as a result of the influ-
ence of transnational processes like Bollywood in America (Shankar, 2008). In these
studies, ethnic youth cultural performances are explored and informed by theories of
place and transnationalism.
These approaches offer a great deal of insight about the “cultural” dynamics at work
in the lives of transnational migrant youth, but they do not address the political and
power dimensions related to immigrant children’s cultural practices in an adequate way.
Consequently, how young people’s political agency can be read in relation to their cul-
tural practices of subject-making have been minimally explored. In this article, I demon-
strate how the everyday lives of these desi youth are suffused with attempts to recognize
and organize their identities in conversation with their complex, precarious, and some-
times frightening worlds of politics and race in a post 9/11 NYC. Such a sociopolitical
context informs immigrant and first-generation immigrant teenagers’ sense of cultural
identities not as ambivalent, rather, they can be read as deeply political expressions of the
self. In this way, this article builds on the meaning of political agency of young people.

Methodology and research participants

For the discussion below, I draw on data from a multisited ethnography, which I began at
a youth center, I term, Youth Organization for South Asian Immigrants (YOSAI), located
in Queens, New York. Since 1996, YOSAI has offered a place where immigrant children
and children of immigrants from South Asia, particularly from Bangladesh, Pakistan,
and India, attend programs on leadership, cultural adjustment, community mobilizing,
public service workshops, and other support classes for preparing for SAT exams or tui-
tions. While conducting research at YOSAI, I also accompanied youth to various work-
shops and events hosted at partner organizations across NYC and as far away as
Washington, DC, which involved workshops on racial justice, summits on issues of post
9/11 racial discrimination, and congressional visits to lobby for the end of bullying and
racial profiling of South Asian and Muslim teenagers in schools. In addition, I interacted
with the teenagers on online forums, such as the organization’s and youths’ Facebook
pages, YouTube pages, and blogs, which comprised an important component of the mul-
tisited ethnography.
I worked with about 30–40 youth at YOSAI, building close rapport for the research
with 20 teens. All the teen participants of this study were between the ages of 14 and 19
and lived in Queens, and attended middle or high schools in NYC. Some of them had
emigrated from South Asia while others were born in the United States soon after their
parents migrated from varying countries in South Asia and its diaspora. Most had
migrated from Bangladesh with their parents while in their infancy, as a result of the
Diversity Immigration Visa Act of 1990, which is popularly known as the “Green Card
Lottery” Act (Kibria, 2011: 23).
The “Lottery” enabled people from particular countries to migrate to the United
States, if those nations had sent fewer than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the
4 Childhood 00(0)

previous 5 years. The number of Bangladeshis in America rose rapidly in the 1980s, from
21,749 in 1990 to 92,237, by 2000 (Kibria, 2007).4 These Bangladeshi families that
migrated through the Green Card Lottery, often live below the poverty line, or are
employed in underpaid and exploitative work in New York, a city in which South Asians
constitute the second largest immigrant group currently, as they had arrived without prior
secure job linkages or any provisions of support that may be available in other immigra-
tion and visa acts (Desis Rising Up and Moving, 2014; Kibria, 2011). The majority of the
youth in this study identify having heritage ties with Bangladesh and are Muslim. Yet,
this article is not just about Bangladeshi Muslim youth, rather it is about immigrant
working-class South Asian teens growing up in Queens, more broadly. The youth whom
I encountered at YOSAI represent a rather wide range of ethnicities, national origins, and
religious affiliations. Hindus from Bangladesh, Sikhs from India, and Muslims from
Pakistan, all factor together as part of the mix at the Center and in the surrounding neigh-
borhood generally. As well, the post 9/11 processes of racialization that informed the
teen practices of political performativity represent identities that go beyond desires for
national and religious affiliation, and in fact, indicate desires for a “brown” community.
Hence, I also refer to the teenagers in this article as South Asian immigrants and South
Asian Americans interchangeably, as these youth are tied together by their racial connec-
tions, and not so much by the fact that they are first- and second-generation migrants or
were immigrants at a young age.
From the inception, I approached the categories of the “teen” and the “adolescent” as
socially and historically constructed categories, particularly prominent since the early
20th century in North American social relations (Lesko, 1996; Raby, 2007), which carry
with them distinct, albeit contrasting, discourses, representations, and expectations
regarding both the promises and the dangers of “youth.” The fears associated with
youth—that is, of being a risk to society—mixed with an implored innocence often
demanded of “childhood,” which frames young people as being “at risk.” As both
“angel” and “devil” (Jenks, 1996), the youth of this study had to negotiate multiple iden-
tities and frameworks within the sociopolitical climate of growing up as immigrants in
New York and, in this way, cannot be understood as outside of the larger frames of age,
ethnicity, geography, and gender. Consequently, I address the desi teenagers alternatively
as children, youth, and young people.
Finally, in this section, I want to draw attention to the approach I adopt for my ethnog-
raphy of childhood. Scholars of childhood studies have established the need to conduct
ethnography with young people as a way to read children’s social agencies through their
own voices (Prout and James, 1997). While this emphasis on children’s voices has been
significant to centering children as participants and as capable beings, it has also been
critiqued by several scholars within the field for the dangers of reading “authenticity” or
“truth” into voices of young people (Alldred and Burman, 2005; Spyrou, 2011). Only
recently, the need to account for meanings produced in silence, through discourses in
which children are situated, children’s representations, and performativity, have been
examined as a way of rethinking social agency of children (Spyrou, 2016a, 2016b).
Building on such scholarship, and drawing on feminist and cultural studies approaches,
my research reflects on an ethnography of childhood wherein, emphasis on reading polit-
ical agency of young people, such as the discussions around social agency of children,
Dar 5

can incorporate also the diverse ways in which children can express their subjectivities
beyond “voice,” that is, through embodiment, and in particular, through the feminist
framework of performativity. Hence, in this article, children’s voices and their performa-
tive practices of subject-making are read together to make sense of their political agency.

Political agency and performativity in childhood

The plea to take performativity seriously and seriously political, in and for the lives of
young people, represents an attempt to meld together insights from cultural studies and
children’s geographies with the theoretical interventions of Judith Butler (1993, 2010).
Together, these conceptions enable a reading of moments like the lungi flash mob as both
enacting and creating a political agency on the part of the desi youth who, with their
actions, traverse multiple, intersecting global, national, local, and personal scales in a
single gesture. A great deal of discussion around childhood and the political tends to
invoke a rights-based approach to political participation, decision-making, and represen-
tation (Hart, 1997; Percy-Smith and Thomas, 2010; Wall and Dar, 2011), particularly in
reference to the mandates and frameworks of the United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child, ratified in 1989. Geographers like Philo and Smith (2003) have
sought to move beyond a rights-based framework to imagine different scales of everyday
politics wherein, macro-level Politics inform and affect the lives of young people in
everyday political practices. This combined scale of “p/Politics” assists in teasing out
different dimensions of political action and context. It does not, however, encourage a
focus on the enacted moment and location where the young people find themselves una-
voidably global and local, macro and micro, at one and the same time.
If these intersections of scales differently inform the politics of young lives, where
can one locate politics in relation with childhood? Krisi Paulina Kallio and Jouni Hakli
(2013), offer that, politics can be locatable “anywhere,” and “that the power relations
generating and upholding political struggles may work through various types of channels
and connections” (p. 8). Here, Kallio and Hakli (2013) read the political in context of the
dynamics of power relations, networks, and the everyday, helping to mitigate the binary
of the Political/political and the global/local. In many ways, this notion of the “political
is anywhere” resembles what Nicola Ansell (2009) proposes for the future of children’s
geography: an approach that consists of networked imaginings—or a “flat ontology”—
wherein flows, connections, and circulations give light to what and how the political
manifests. Such scholarship, though, has made little advancement in terms of under-
standing the contexts of race, ethnicity, and adult regulatory regimes of control, such as
the post 9/11 order for youth politics. Examining various flows and connections, then, in
a globalized world affecting immigrant children and children of ethnic minorities in
diverse ways, helps reveal the location of the political, and can be productive in under-
standing identities of young people in relation to politics, shaped by the networks and
ties with South Asia—something I discuss further in the following sections.
Locating the political does not, in itself, necessarily highlight who can be political,
and how one can be political, particularly in the context of children, who seem to be
excluded from political life in multiple scales (Skelton, 2013). To this point, I find geog-
rapher’s frames of “doing” (Bosco, 2010) and “being” political (Isin, 2002; Kallio and
6 Childhood 00(0)

Hakli, 2013) offer greater possibilities in examining the political agency in childhood
and youth. Fernando Bosco (2010) argues that a focus

on children’s doings—is important because it allows us to highlight the political impact of

children’s activities and it permits us to see how children contribute to create conditions for
political and social change while allowing children to retain their own activities (their play,
their work, and so on) as such. (p. 386)

Such an approach accounts, perhaps, for the “difference” (Wall, 2012) in young people
that beckons a new imagining of relation with politics than that applied for adults, and
assists to re-envision “politics” in the context of childhood. Furthermore, Kallio and
Hakli (2013) also argue that the context of young people’s “situations” also demonstrate
the political (p. 10). That is to say, “depending on where and how children and young
people are situated, they [children] face different opportunities and hindrances to their
political action” (p. 10). Such an explanation to some degree takes into account the fact
that politics will have different meanings for different children, and that not all young
people will share the same political agendas either. For instance, children facing racism
express a desire for politics that counters racism, whereas White children do not (O’Toole,
2003: 78). While not ideal, in the same sense, the possibilities to express and conduct
political action too may be varied for different children, if we begin to account for the
differing ways in which we read political agency in childhood and youth, especially for
those whose ethnic and racial identities are sharp markers of the self within the context
of post 9/11 experiences.
Here, then, Judith Butler’s (1993, 2010) theory of “performativity” provides a helpful
conceptual leverage point to grapple with desi youths’ positions and actions. For Butler,
performativity links all acts—or ways “to do”—to acts of subject formation. That is, any
performative act, and not mere performance alone, is the enactment of an identity of the
self, which is generated through the repeated circulation of norms and their transgres-
sion. Embeded in Butler’s theory of performativity is also her theory of agency, wherein,
the repetitive character of the performative also destabilizes norms. If acts of repetition
and embodiment of particular identities are manifest on and presented by particular bod-
ies, then it can be read as the expression of a particular self, and this self, like suggested
by Butler, Kallio, and Hakli, is political, and as I contend, can be read in childhood too
as political agency. Hence, it becomes important to read the embodied, playful, and
youthful acts of the teens of this study, as I highlight in the following sections, as per-
formative politics, wherein children who contend with norms and constraints of their
sociopolitical context on a daily basis are deeply engaged with relations of power as they
play out on their bodies and shape their subjectivities through global, local, and transna-
tional networks.

Lungi style flash mob and desi teens in public spaces

I return here to the opening segment of the lungi flash mob, and unpack the context in
which it occurred, and read closely the subjective performance of the teens, where they
dance to a Korean pop song, in their lungis, with altered lyrics, on the streets of Queens,
Dar 7

New York. In order to organize this street scene, many of the participants communicated
through phone text messaging and Facebook messages. Although many of these teens
knew each other through their time together at YOSAI, some did not; they all came
together through an online blog, Bengali Memes, which also recorded and posted the
YouTube video link of the teenagers’ flash mob performance on its web page. I asked
Rizwaan, the lead organizer of the flash mob, who is also an active member at YOSAI,
why his friends and he decided to participate in the Gangnam style flash mob. His
response offers a deep revelation of a connection with his homeland, as well as a distinct
identity as a South Asian American:

Did you not see the YouTube video of those kids in Bangladesh?… They did one [flash mob]
in Bangladesh! They [kids in Bangladesh] were way ahead of us. If they could do a flash mob
of Gangnam Style so quickly and post it [on YouTube], we had to get up and respond as well.
So, we decided we will come up with our own style on the pop song.

Around the same time as the above exchange, several other youth from universities
across the United States were also posting YouTube videos of flash mob performances of
Gangnam Style. Rizwaan and his friends chose to respond particularly to their counter-
parts in Bangladesh, and that too with a desire to “come up with our own style on the pop
song.” In their desire to respond to the “kids in Bangladesh” in their flash mob, these desi
teens claim a difference from Bangladesh, yet, through the manifest connection with the
“homeland”—through the draping of the lungi over their clothes (i.e. predominantly
worn by men in South Asia, but not in the video from Bangladesh) and the alteration to
the lyrics of the song (with emphasis on their embodied dress)—these teens reflect ties
with a point of origin and heritage, while at the same time, perform their ethnic identities
in the streets of New York.
The lungi usually occupies the domain of the private space in the diaspora. Sagar,
another teen participant of the flash mob, shared that it is uncommon for his father to
wear his lungi outside of the house, and definitely not dance in it, and in part this was his
impetus to employ the lungi into his performance. Sagar shared with me that, “Yeah! My
dad’s not gonna dance in his lungi! So why don’t I do it?” Compounded by this explana-
tion, the embodying practice of wearing the lungi in the streets then displaces the lungi
from the diasporic private adult home space and brings it into a public performative
manifestation of an identification with South Asia for these immigrant teens.
What makes this public performative manifestation of their subjectivity pertinent is
also the context in which they are growing up. Moral discourses on “stranger-danger”
inform practices of “safe spaces” and have increasingly led to the monitoring, “island-
ing,” and privatization of spaces for children in the Global North (Cahill, 1990; Zeiher,
2001). At the same time, independent older children, such as teenagers, hanging out on
the streets, inspire “moral panics,” wherein they are seen as “dangerous” beings who
may disrupt or cause harm to others in the streets (Stephens, 1995; Valentine, 1996).
These conceptions of young people frame popular views about them in public spaces. So
much so that even children are quite aware of the concern they inspire when traveling the
streets independently (Mugan and Erkip, 2009), because young people note and experi-
ence the “subtle regulatory regimes by which adults maintain their hegemony in public
8 Childhood 00(0)

space” (Valentine, 2004: 83). For youth who are further marked by their race in public
spaces, experiences of these adult regimes take on a sordid turn. Many of the boys and
girls from my study articulated through poems and in conversations, varying degrees of
fear and concerns about walking around in the streets of NYC in the post 9/11 climate of
Islamophobia. They shared experiences of how people stare and regulate their brown
bodies and how they experience feelings of being othered. Two of the teenage boys who
participated in the flash mob had previously related to me that their parents were con-
cerned about them traveling alone in the city streets. Sagar, who was also part of the
lungi flash mob has a curfew of 7 pm, and another boy, Maalik, 17 years old, is not
allowed to go hangout with friends in the streets or parks of Queens. His parents are
concerned about his presence in public spaces. Shah, who was 16 years old at the time,
related in a video he made about his experience of growing up in a post 9/11 environment
that his parents worried about him even stepping out of the house in the day, for fear that
he would be hurt because of the color of his skin. He was alluding to the hate crimes
South Asians faced along with Arabs and Muslims soon after the 9/11 attacks. Yet,
despite these processes of restrictions on mobility and presence in public spaces imposed
by adults and the larger practices of Islamophobia, teens continually exert their presence
in public spaces, as I witnessed on several occasions, and in the particular case of this
lungi style flash mob, as well. Their performative assertion of their identities—by doing
and being—as desis, along with their occupation of the social space of childhood in the
public streets of New York necessitates a reading of desi teen lives as political, and their
choice of dancing in a lungi on a street corner as their political agency. By being physi-
cally present in the streets of Jackson Heights—wearing a lungi and claiming public
space and displaying their desi identity—the teens’ performativity challenges the hegem-
ony of the adult racist public space of New York.
Such a reading of the lungi flash mob of desi teens is further supported through an
understanding of flash mobs, more generally, as being a “strong spectacular dimension
[which] explicitly aims to capture public attention” (Gore, 2010: 126). More specifically,
flash mobs can also be read as “type[s] of performative resistance” (Walker, 2011: 3),
wherein,

mob participants break the norms of acceptable behavior and by doing so perform the dual
function of: (1) waking up their own participant bodies to the idea that other options for
behavior exist, as well as (2) reminding the audience of the mob of the absurd and arbitrary
nature of so-called “normal.” In other words, the flash mob reminds us that we actually have a
choice. (p. 15)

This lungi flash mob too, can be read as enabling desi teens to rework the hegemonic
space of the streets and carve new public identities for themselves; one where they are
not ambivalent about their South Asian identity rather, explicitly making embodied and
performative transnational connections with Bangladesh and the lungi-wearing region of
South Asia. As teen mobbers perform, they simultaneously choose to de-territorialize the
lungi and situate it also alongside the globally popularized Korean dance moves and
popular beats of “Gangnam Style.” Desi teens’ subject positions reflect ties with a past
heritage that are marked by their global and transnational engagements. In this way, teens
Dar 9

re-create meanings about their selves, functioning in everyday life through performative
acts—or ways of doing and being—that disrupt where a lungi is “normally” present, as
they find a way to make K-Pop their own form of expression and relate it with their
experiences as desis in the streets, despite experiences of hate crimes and parents’ own
fears of their presence in the streets. This performative practice of a flash mob (as well
as their choice of clothing, and their embodied acts of tattoos that I will relate in the
subsequent sections) reflects youth choice as well as their political agency, wherein desi
teen subjectivities become marked by their manifestations of it in public.

Choosing ethnic attire and politics of youth

The choice of attire, whether for a special occasion, or otherwise, offers stylistic and
cultural allegiance for the wearer (Lurie, 1992; Rugh, 1986), through which their affilia-
tions and identities are made public and political (Baker, 1985; Hebdige, 1979). But
clothing also marks a difference from others. Read as a performative act, embodying a
certain dress, like in the case of wearing a lungi during the flash mob, and the instance
described below, makes explicit the youths’ political identities as diasporic South Asian.
Yet, making such identities explicit also renders the desi teens as the “other,” considering
the context in which they perform their identity. In 2012, Nabab, a 16-year-old boy who
attended the YOSAI center regularly, chose to wear a lungi for the Decades Day celebra-
tion at his high school during Spirit Week, a week in which children celebrate some
aspect of their identity, by wearing an attire to school that reflects a particular decade of
their past, so as to honor that time period.5 Usually, high-school teens who celebrate this
Day during Spirit Week, dress up as per stereotypical Eurowestern fashion styles of a
particular decade, such as puffed sleeves or polkadot dresses, signifying the 1960s, and
so forth. Nabab was excited to wear his father’s lungi and posted an image of himself
dressed for school on his Facebook page that morning. However, at the end of the day,
Nabab posted another picture of himself in a lungi on Facebook with his face covered by
one hand, almost indicating a form of being shamed, and further adds the following mes-
sage alongside the image of himself dressed in a lungi, which describes the scene in the
picture as reproduced below:

So I went to school and then changed in to the lungi since [change] of the [Decade Day] status.
And the security guard tells me to take it off otherwise he’ll escort me outta the school. Well
gee that’s a great way to start my Senior Spirit week. Oh well. I ain’t showin my face tho.

This above message describes how Nabab’s plans for celebrating a “decade” at school
ended up as an act of shaming, wherein he “ain’t showin [his] face” even on Facebook.
Nabab decided to wear a lungi, which one of his friends, Mueen, explains to me was an
act by Nabab to, “show his pride in his country for decades day.” While Nabab is American,
here Mueen is suggesting “his country” is Bangladesh, his family’s country of emigration.
Mueen further explains that Nabab was showing pride by wearing the lungi because it is
“like a decade when they wore the clothes.” Here, by “they,” Mueen suggests persons of
his father’s generation, and a “decade” his father first arrived in the United States, as such,
still wearing his ethnic clothes. Hence, for Nabab, celebrating Decades Day at school
10 Childhood 00(0)

signifies an opportunity to make a sociopolitical stand on his history in America, deployed

through the lungi here again (as in the case of the Lungi Style Flash Mob), in a space—the
school—where immigrant South Asian youth often experience racism. What remains
critical is the regulation of this allegiance to this identity, as the security guard tells Nabab
to “take it [lungi] off otherwise he’ll escort [him] outta [out of] the school.” Despite such
regulatory regimes, or because of them, the teens wore the lungi in the flash mob in the
public space of the streets, and Nabab posted his message on a public online forum. Some
of Nabab’s friends responded to his post about his experience at school with messages of
“respect” and support. Desi teens attire, read as a performative act, hence, affords possi-
bilities for reading their political agency and standpoints.
On other occasions of celebration too, I witnessed, desi teens employ their dress to
embody their heritage identity. During Thanksgiving break, YOSAI organizes a celebra-
tion for their youth. On one Saturday in November 2012, youth gathered to celebrate
three festivals and holidays: Eid, Diwali, and Thanksgiving. While the invitation flyer
describes the attractions of the event as including “food & music” and “henna and pho-
tos,” many of the teens who attended the celebrations focused instead on their attire and
various styles of dress. The teens wore either salwar-kameez or kurta-pajama6 and chat-
ted about where they got their clothes from and admired each other’s outfits. Some of the
youth were comparing how fashionable their attire was in relation to the trends in
Bollywood, and Rizwaan in particular, who is a fan of the popular Bollywood actor, Shah
Rukh Khan, flouted his pathani style pajama, commonly worn by the actor in many mov-
ies, and asked: “I look like Shah Rukh Khan, don’t I?” Rizwaan, later in the day, also
danced to many of his Bollywood icon’s songs and enjoyed the celebrations hosted at
YOSAI with his friends. The teens’ choice of dress and dance depict how they not only
establish a link with a past heritage and history of migration, as the lungi implied earlier,
but also with contemporary global trends of fashion from Bollywood. In their stylistic
choice of clothes and by taking photographs and posting them on their Facebook pro-
files, teens embody, memorialize, and mark their identities as shaped by experiences
with South Asia, rendering a reading of their politics of the self. Moreover, considering
that these teens are celebrating Thanksgiving at this event, wearing desi clothes is a sign
of political agency—as a form of subversion, perhaps—wherein the ways in which
immigrant American children choose to celebrate Thanksgiving is through linking it with
and wearing their ethnic clothing, positioning their subjectivities in American festivals as
marked by their performative embodied practices of being desi. Similar celebrations of
Thanksgiving were observed the following 2 years at YOSAI as well, making this
repeated act of performativity, as Butler reminds us, significant for the reading of repeti-
tion and transgression of norms, and by extension, youth politics and agency.

Youthful practices of politics

During the summer of 2010, many teenage girls participating in a leadership workshop
at YOSAI in Queens were hanging out in their youth lounge discussing plans to make
and wear t-shirts that say: “I’m American. I’m not a terrorist.” This t-shirt-making plan
was inspired by the approaching 10th-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and a con-
certed effort to respond to the ensuing Islamophobia that resulted in hate and racist
Dar 11

crimes faced by some of the teens or their friends and the extended South Asian com-
munity with whom I conducted my research. The girls who wanted to make these t-shirts
were Sikh, Muslim, or Hindu, but they were unified in their actions as it was their South
Asian working-class community that together has been a victim of Islamophobia. Here
religion, and Islam, then shifts into being a racialized category for them (Maira, 2004);
and the act of making and wearing a t-shirt later on, explicitly commenting on
Islamophobia, an expression of their embodied racial identities and their performative
political agency.
The idea of the slogan, “I’m American. I’m not a terrorist,” was designed by the teens,
drawing on a refrain, “My name is Khan. I’m not a terrorist,” circulated through a recent
2010 Bollywood cinema film, My Name is Khan. Most of the teens had seen this film
and we had also discussed it during one of our sessions, as it reflected resemblance to
their realities of experiencing Islamophobia. Since the group of girls that decided to
make these t-shirts was multifaith, their twist to the phrase is interesting. While they
draw attention here to “I am American,” they also embody through the phrase, a transna-
tional subjectivity; one that is adopted from Bollywood cinema, and reflects also their
belonging not just to a single nation but a racialized sense of being—I’m not a terror-
ist—making their sociopolitical stand on Islamophobia explicit through their act of mak-
ing and wearing these shirts. They mark their subject positions by wearing these t-shirts
on their “American” bodies, as they claim through the phrase, which are also simultane-
ously racialized and have been othered. Such a claim toward an “American” identity may
be read as problematic, as the phrase affirms that any non-American is a terrorist.
However, the context in which these t-shirts was developed, and that the girls making the
t-shirts drew on the refrain from the Bollywood film that aims to contest Islamophobia,
represent the contentious ways in which political identities are assigned and adopted.
These teens represent connections with transnational South Asia and being American, at
once, and affirm their racialized politics here, given the sociopolitical context that ques-
tions their belonging to America.
Similarly, the youthful practices of tattoo inscriptions further enable a reading of desi
children’s expression of identity politics and their agency. During the end-of-season pro-
gram celebrations at YOSAI (hosted at the end of every season), girls bring out their
henna cones and henna patterns to craft designs on each other’s wrists, palms, and arms.
On one such occasion in 2011, some boys and girls requested me to inscribe their names
on their arms in their heritage language. Since Hindi is the more popular diasporic lan-
guage of South Asia (as a result of Bollywood), and a language I can read and write in,
they requested me to inscribe their names in that script. Another boy, Alag, however, was
insistent that he wanted to inscribe his name in Arabic, his heritage language, or no other
marking on his body was possible. The two of us then, searched for a website that could
help us with this. The teens then took a picture of these inscriptions on their arms and
posted them on Facebook, instantly memorializing these inscriptions of identity in the
public space of Facebook. Two other young boys who attended YOSAI classes, now
working there, have tattoos in Hindi, saying “ohm” and “aveksha” on their arms. The
former is a sacred syllable of dharmic religions, and the latter is a Hindi word that means
being watched over, at least according to the youth himself. In both instances, of tempo-
rary henna tattoos and the permanent inscriptions, the markings on their arms with words
12 Childhood 00(0)

from their heritage language reflect the embodied performativity of ethnic identities, and
open up a reading of political action where young people’s “doings” can be read through
frames of their own distinct activities.

Conclusion
This article adopts a multidisciplinary approach to the analysis of politics of young peo-
ple, an area of study that has been minimally examined in childhood studies. By drawing
on the feminist framework of “performativity” and children’s geographers’ conceptions
about “doing” politics and “being” political, I examine the daily, playful, youthful, and
embodied forms of subject-making among immigrant South Asians growing up in the
United States in a post 9/11 NYC. Performativity, understood in this article as including
embodied and everyday forms of subject-making, engaged with processes of repetition
and transgression of norms, functions as a conceptual tool to understand the performative
politics of young people as associated with their subject-making processes, and locations,
where power dynamics are negotiated in daily and in-between spaces of the street, youth
center, and online spaces. Through the performative politics of the lungi flash mob, teen-
agers’ engagement with ethnic attire in school and on Thanksgiving, embodied acts of
t-shirt-making, and tattoo inscription on their bodies, I contend desi teens cultural identi-
ties to be deeply linked with their heritage past and are made visible also as a response to
the experiences of hegemonic adult control and racism. Teens of this study also draw on
global forms of music and Bollywood in their subject-making acts, making explicit their
ties with a past heritage that are marked by their global and transnational engagements.
Unlike previous scholarship on immigrant teens’ cultural identities, and of South
Asian youth identities, wherein the youth indicate ambivalence about their connections
with their heritage homeland, the immigrant working-class teens of this study, growing
up in post 9/11 Queens, despite, or oftentimes because of the racism and fear of hate
crimes, reflect engagements with being desi in the public space of streets and online
forums as acts of choice, or what I read as their political agency. I argue that desi teens’
political agency is manifest in their performativity as they negotiate their cultural identi-
ties across multiple scales, as a result of the sociopolitical contexts in which they are situ-
ated, and highlights how, when, and in what ways young desis are also political. This
article hence, builds significant links between contexts, subject-making acts, performa-
tivity of young desi teens, and their politics, rendering new critical and multidisciplinary
ways in which to examine young people’s political agency.

Acknowledgements
I value and appreciate the intellectual and financial support this research received from two key
sources: The Department of Childhood Studies & The Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers,
The State University of New Jersey, USA. I would also like to acknowledge the contributions of
the desi teens from Queens, who participated in this research, and also allowed me entry into their
lives as a friend, mentor, and community member.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Dar 13

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. Desi is a colloquial term adopted by the South Asian diasporic communities for self-identi-
fication. The term has roots in Sanskrit and Devanagri scripts and literally means a local in
a foreign land. It refers to all immigrants irrespective of their citizenship and resident status,
and has come to represent a self-constructed ethnic categorization of South Asians. For more
instances where the South Asian diaspora community self-identifies with this term, Desi, see
Maira, 2008; Shankar, 2008.
2. Lungi is a long piece of cotton cloth tied around the waist down by men in the eastern and
southern parts of the Indian subcontinent.
3. While understood very distinctly, for more on new ethnicities, see Rumbaut and Portes, 2001,
and for hybridity, see Bhabha, 1994.
4. “According to the US Immigration and Naturalization Services (US-INS) admission data from
1996-2001, about 30.5 percent of Bangladeshis in America were admitted on the Diversity
Program.” See Kibria, 2007.
5. I draw on the meaning of Spirit Week from one of the teens in my study who explained it to
me as such. Not all high schools participate in this informal ritual of celebrating entry into
high school, and it is celebrated differently at each high school.
6. Both these forms of clothing include long shirts worn over loose pants. Girls and women wear
the salwar-kameez and the kurta-pajama is worn by boys and men. The gendered difference in
the two is noticeable in the styles of stitching of the two outfits and the color variations available.

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