Dancing between worlds: double consciousness and cultural transition in Sejal Shah’s This Is One Way to Dance

This article examines Sejal Shah’s memoir This Is One Way to Dance through W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, arguing that this framework, originally developed to theorise African American experience under Jim Crow racial stratification, can be productively extended to illuminate contemporary Indian American diasporic identity formation within the Global South diaspora. While Du Bois theorised double consciousness in relation to early twentieth-century racial stratification, this study demonstrates its continued relevance for understanding how South Asian Americans navigate cultural hybridity, racialisation, and belonging in multicultural America. Through close textual analysis, the article explores how Shah negotiates ‘warring ideals’ of Indian heritage and American identity through memory, language, food, dance, and family rituals. Drawing on racial triangulation theory and the concept of ‘third space,’ the analysis reveals how Shah transforms double consciousness from a burden into a deliberate strategy for cultural assertion and hybrid identity formation. Situating Shah’s writing within a contemporary fin de siècle context marked by intensified Global South migration, this article demonstrates how extending Du Bois’s framework to South Asian American experience reveals both the structural similarities and the historically specific differences in how double consciousness operates across racialised diasporic communities.