A Curriculum of Cultural Translation: Desi identities in American Chai

Abstract

This article examines narrative articulations in the film American Chai as a complicated conversation in relation to the sociocultural constructions of bi/cultural-identities within Indian diaspora communities. Unpacking the way desi (first-generation Indo-Canadian) identities are enunciated in/as a quantum (third) space – one that is continuously shifting and deferred – the author contemplates how we might reconsider the narratives put forth in this film as a curriculum of cultural translations. In turn, her curriculum theory project provokes us to ask what we might learn from inter-generational culture-clashes in the curricular spaces among Indian and Western cultures depicted in film. The author draws upon screenplay pedagogy to analyze and then synthesize possible ways that desi movies sometimes employ melodrama to construct a curriculum of living at, within, and among the interstitial and temporal margins of different cultural spaces. The article concludes by proposing that working through a curriculum of cultural translations put forth by films can help one to reconstruct their subjectivity anew in relation to the ongoing migratory transnational movements of diaspora communities here in Canada.