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Rethinking Desi: Race, Class, and Online Activism of South Asian Immigrants in the United States

Television & New Media

Published online on

Abstract

This article examines drumnyc.org, the website of New York–based South Asian activist organization Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), and interrogates the politics of the site within the overlapping contexts of the racialization of South Asian immigrants, online activism, and desi cultures in the United States. My central argument is that drumnyc.org foregrounds working-class South Asian immigrants as active political subjects negotiating their pathways to cultural citizenship in the United States by articulating belonging to technologies of race, transnational class formations, and network cultures. Drumnyc.org also exemplifies the web’s role in revealing the instability of ideals of desi diasporic identification with the "original" South Asian homeland in the face of new temporal and spatial expressions of immigrant belonging such as websites devoted to representing and advancing working-class desi activism.