SOUTH ASIAN is a term that encompasses people who largely come from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, the Maldives, Fiji, the Caribbean, and beyond. It’s a term that encompasses people of diverse caste, class, gender, sexual, religious, and ethnic identities. 

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But the way the term is used in mainstream American society – by both non-South Asian and South Asian folk – often simplifies this rich diversity of identities and histories, and presents the South Asian American community as a monolith, where the term becomes synonymous with Indian and Hindu. This act of erasure also promotes casteism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, classism, colorism, anti-Blackness, and ableism in our communities. 

 

The intent of South Asian Memory Work is to explore the expansiveness and complexity of South Asian identity by centering the memories and lived experiences of South Asian Americans whose histories and intersecting identities have been erased, and continues to be erased in

a mainstream context. By recounting and recording these lived experiences, we can start to visualise a collective future. It should be noted that not everyone who comes from the regions mentioned above identifies as South Asian. The project strongly believes that this term should be never be imposed, and that we should always defer to how people choose to self-identify.

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As the editor of this project, it felt important for me to question what I've been taught about storytelling. Traditional storytelling, especially when telling stories of communities and people of color, doesn’t allow for this nuance. It makes assumptions about an audience’s ability to handle complexity, it often peddles trauma, and it highlights patterns when there are none. I don’t believe that identity can be put into a singular box and the approach that I’ve taken is aligned with that. There is no holistic narrative around the South Asian American experience, and so, my approach to storytelling was to simply record lived experiences, even if what I discovered surprised or confused me. The design follows a similar path. Instead of choosing a templatized method of design, a unique visual world has been created for each interviewee.   

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I’m not the only storyteller here. Each person who agreed to participate in South Asian Memory Work is the storyteller of their own story. While I did do the interviewing, transcribing, and art direction, each story was finalised and approved by the storyteller, so as to ensure that the stories you’re now seeing are as each storyteller intended. 

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This is an ongoing project.