How does “authenticity” get defined in the diaspora?
I try to argue in the book that for second generation youth, authenticity gets defined by their parents, by the media, and by the institutions they participate in. Authenticity tends to be based on very particular elements of Indian culture that get transplanted to the US. and those elements are not necessarily representative of cultures within India, which are changing very rapidly, nor are they representative of the experiences of the second generation in the US. So there’s this dissonance that is created. A lot of people have written about the so-called culture clash and the clash of two worlds for second generation Indian Americans. There has been a lot of focus in the Indian immigrant media on the supposedly confused generation and I think the book is trying to complicate that idea by pointing out that it’s not really the second generation per se that’s confused, but it is this notion of authenticity that is very limiting and that actually creates this tension in the second genera
