South Asian Diasporic Music and the Performance of Race

In this article, I analyze white American performances of South Asian music as concurrent performances of racial identity. I deploy a performance studies perspective that treats the visible and audible manifestations of race as performative agents in the manufacturing of racial structures. Scholars of interracial performance such as Philip Deloria, Eric Lott, and E. Patrick Johnson have long examined the ways white Americans have used the traditional art forms of ethnic Others as a means of understanding their own whiteness in silhouette. Likewise, I argue here that the performance and consumption of Hindustani music in its American diasporic context serves as a sort of funhouse mirror, forcing white practitioners and spectators to confront their own Orientalizing impulses and thereby affording them the opportunity to do whiteness differently. This article is structured in two parts. The first follows ethnographic interviews with a white American sitar player across his interactions with South Asian collaborators and audiences; the second reverses this gaze, this time analyzing a South Asian tabla player’s performance before a white Euro-American audience. I demonstrate the ways the question of authenticity generates a productive anxiety in white practitioners and consumers of South Asian music, one that ultimately leads them to perform their whiteness differently before the brown gaze. In calling this a “performance” of whiteness, I mean that these cross-cultural transgressions go beyond making whiteness visible, as Lott and Deloria suggest, towards actually producing a different kind of whiteness, one that is in dialogue with the perspective and demands of the non-white Other.