The Karma of Brown Folk

Prashad, Vijay. 2000. The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. $24.95 hc. $16.95 sc. xv + 253pp. Perhaps I am not alone in fearing an outbreak of racism due to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. While many Americans have expressed their nationalism with tri-colored ribbons and flags, some hate crimes were reported when the identity of the terrorists was revealed. In a time like this, it is especially important to reexamine the complexities of race and ethnicity in America. Prashad's book is an excellent choice to gain insights on Americans of South Asian descent. It is no coincidence that the title of Vijay Prashad's book reminds readers ofW E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk. Coming across Du Bois's book in Calcutta two decades ago,Vijay Prashad draws from Du Bois's question, "How does it feel to be a problem?" (vii), and writes about the problematic question that South Asians in the US. face: "How does it feel to be a solution?" (viii). In The Karma of Brown Folk, Prashad explores the feelings and the consciousness of the desis (people who claim ancestry from South Asia), who are often considered a model minority and a solution to the crisis of Black America. While Prashad limits his observations to South Asian diasporas, he extends his discussions to literature, popular culture, history, and immigration policy in the US. Prashad first examines the views of American intellectuals towards India, specifically looking at Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman, and points out that traditionally, like European orientalism, "U.S. orientalism divides the world into halves" and considers the Orient as fundamentally different from the Occident (12). In short, Prashad reiterates the intellectuals' views, the East appears spiritual, exotic, and sensual in the minds of intellectuals, and often genedered as female, while the West remains realistic, materialist, and capitalist, gendered as male. The Orient is poor, confined, and ahistorical, while America is rich, free and dynamic. More specifically, in Thoreau, Prashad sees the transcendentalist's dissatisfaction with the New England industrialization and argues that the "solution to modern alienation for Thoreau lay in the East" (18). Such a view, Prashad problematizes, ignores "the multitudinous realities of India" (20). Prashad's extensive study covers the influence of popular culture on the image of India as mysterious, romantic, and spiritual. It makes sense that such an image of India arises from the exaggerated reports for fundraising by Christian missionaries and traveling Indian lecturers, like Swami Vivekananda, as Prashad points out. The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and movies also emphasized South Asia's exoticism, as seen in oversexed women surrounding an effeminate sultan, and exotic animals. Additionally, the Beat generation, Proto-New Age, cult groups and hippies in the twentieth century also elevated the image of South Asia, according to Prashad, as they turned to the East, which offered them spirituality and community of love, as opposed to the West, which represented material culture and industrial capitalism. Regrettably, Prashad notes, the complexity of South Asian culture is often ignored and Indians generally appear to white Americans to be content and welldisciplined by karma (fate), inferior to white America, yet superior to African Americans because of Indian spirituality. …