Bio: Dr. Nicola Mooney teaches in UFV’s department of Social, Cultural, and Media Studies, and is Senior Associate at the South Asian Studies Institute. Her research focuses on the Punjabi community of northwest India and its diaspora, and particularly on Jat Sikhs. Her ethnography, Rural Nostalgias and Transnational Dreams: Identity and Modernity among Jat Sikhs (University of Toronto Press 2011), interrogates ethnicity, urbanization, and migration, their impacts on society, history, memory, and identity, and their relations to religion, gender, class, caste, the nation-state, postcoloniality, and modernity. She has also written a number of articles and chapters on gender, caste, and religion (and their intersections), in addition to pieces on popular cinema, cultural performance, and poetics. Nicola’s ongoing work broadly relates to the connections between identity, religion, caste, gender, migration, and modernity. At UFV since 2007, Nicola has taught courses in anthropology, sociology, and South Asian studies.

Abstract: In posing this question, I ponder whether the category "South Asian" has meaning for those who might be assembled within its taxonomy. Is “South Asia” merely a handy academic label, or is it a socially-meaningful mode of identification, and a site of potential solidarity? And what is at stake in how we answer these questions? My paper explores the category "South Asian" with regard to whether, and how, it is occupied, inhabited, and discursively claimed by particular communities, substantively or strategically. Drawing from anthropology and diaspora theory, and thinking through shifting modes of classification and identification, I consider how "South Asia" is both a global and a reductionist signifier, embedded in, constructed through, and at the same time at odds with experiences and expressions of place, migration, and emplacement. Rendered especially meaningful in diaspora contexts, I suggest that "South Asia" accommodates but also erases diversity, even as it seems to create new modes of identification. As such, it seems to reiterate tensions between nation(s) and region(s), centre and margins, dominance and subordination, global and local, universal and particular that have long been debated - for instance, in the juxtaposition of the South Asian village and broader, 'civilizational' modes of society, linked via problematic hierarchies of caste (and gender). In examining how an apparently simple geographic label glosses complex, meaningful, and potentially fraught aspects of culture and identity, I also touch upon the relationship of "South Asia" to the 'subcontinent' of colonial writing, the borders of the post-colonial nation-state, the Indocentrism of Hindutva nationalism, the singularity of other Indic categories such as caste, and the nexus of race and ethnicity. Amid and through all of this, I assert the importance of the local, of culture, and of place, making reference to ethnographic experiences and personal encounters with Jat Sikh, Punjabi, and Rajasthani interlocutors, friends, and kin in India and Canada. Thus, at the same time, I question the premise that "South Asia" necessarily conveys elementary relationships between place, culture, and identity.