Of Silk Saris and Mini-Skirts

Using articles from Canadian mainstream media, discussions withCanada’s South Asian community, and interviews with young second-generationSouth Asian women about their relationships with school and familyduring the early to mid-1990s, Handa sets out to contest the dominantculture clash model that has been used to explain how South Asian adolescentsare “torn” or “caught” between the values of “traditional” (SouthAsian) and “modern” (Canadian) culture. Handa argues,... that women and youth have become symbols of the sets of values thatare seen to be in need of protection from the process of modern socialprogress … certain notions of women and youth are mobilized in order tomaintain and assert specific notions of identity and belonging. (p. 19)Also, she points out that “South Asian cultural identities rely on particulardefinitions of womanhood in order to assert a distinct Eastern identity visà-vis the West” (p. 19).The book is organized into seven chapters. The first chapter situates thecentral issues and questions she raises in her book amidst recollections ofher past experiences in Canada and her reflections on present-day changesin Canada’s South Asian community. The bulk of this chapter focuses oncritiquing the dominant “culture clash” model in an effort to underscore itsinadequacies. This critique hinges primarily on theoretical discussions ofculture and identity, which become the theoretical framework for her work.In the following five chapters, the author shares her findings, analyses,and arguments. Each chapter focuses on developing one particular aspectof her central argument, although many common subtexts and themesthread their way through them. Some of the main themes and subtexts arethe invisibility of whiteness in relation to the ethnicity of browness; the centralityof a white Canadian identity and the maintenance of white power andprivilege; and the positioning of young South Asian women by discoursesof East/West, modern/traditional, and brown/white, as well as their continuousnegotiation of identities. In the last chapter, Handa plants the seeds ofpossibility for a collective political voice of opposition to racism built onblack and South Asian diasporic voices ...