The Power of Cultural Studies
Deep in the dog days of a summer during a pandemic, and as the partner of an essential worker, there’s very very little to do--scrolling through my phone I see friends taking a week off, going to some sort of heavily wooded area and assemble some sort of summer break situation. Me? My getaways consist of exploring new netflix lands or planning a podcast getaway with a new show or host that I’m eager to learn from. So I was excited to see that Code Switch popped up on my phone as a podcast to listen to. It was a podcast that I enjoyed a while back, and to be honest, can’t remember why I stopped listening. Then again, does anyone remember anything pre-COVID? I sure don't.
I started to settle in again with this old friend, I was excited to see an episode focused on the fight for the first ethnic studies department at San Francisco State fifty years ago. It’s an amazing story, and one worth listening to, and learning from. For added texture, I recommend following that episode up with a chaser of the PBS Series Asian Americans, which also recounts this story, and digs deeper into the role that Asian Americans played in this important struggle, serving as a backbone in building the coalition of what was then called the third world, to fight for the ability to learn their history, in an academically rigorous, pedagogically sound way.
I remember my own time at Bryn Mawr College, and how, through cobbling together classes from Haverford College and University of Pennsylvania and independent studies, I was able to create my own concentration in South Asian studies. Studying the history of the Indian Diaspora helped me widen the aperture of understanding my people, realizing the parallel slave trade that went on with South Asians, as slaves from Africa were liberated from bondage. Studying South Asian literature, and reading books as The God of Small Things, Midnight’s Children, and Interpreter of Maladies, helped me see how my people were able to use the colonizers language of the colonizers to weave magical stories that included vivid descriptions of my ancestors land, and spun new realities that I felt at home in in a way that I never felt in the Western Canon. Studying Bengali as a language allowed me the freedom to read Tagore in Bengali script, delving into my father's language in solitude. And studying South Asian cities afforded me the ability to travel to Kolkata to interview officials from the Calcutta Municipal Corporation to uncover philanthropy’s role in the development of the city.
All of these experiences and courses helped me understand my homeland, my people, and my culture in a fair and nuanced way, without romanticizing my past, without depending on my parents to be my translators. I’m forever grateful to the organizers of SF State, 50 years late, who normalized this idea of ethnic studies. Without it, who knows who I would have been today?
