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Journal of International and Intercultural
Communication
ISSN: 1751-3057 (Print) 1751-3065 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjii20
The subcontinent speaks: Intercultural
communication perspectives from/on South Asia
Shaunak Sastry & Srividya Ramasubramanian
To cite this article: Shaunak Sastry & Srividya Ramasubramanian (2020) The subcontinent
speaks: Intercultural communication perspectives from/on South Asia, Journal of International and
Intercultural Communication, 13:2, 93-97, DOI: 10.1080/17513057.2020.1745440
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2020.1745440
Published online: 07 Apr 2020.
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INTRODUCTION
The subcontinent speaks: Intercultural communication
perspectives from/on South Asia
Shaunak Sastry
a
and Srividya Ramasubramanian
b
a
Department of Communication, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA;
b
Department of
Communication, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
That this special issue has seen the light of day is primarily due to the vision of Todd
Sandel, the outgoing editor of the Journal of International and Intercultural Communi-
cation, who readily identified the relative lack of visibility of South Asia focused intercul-
tural communication research, suggested a special issue, and offered us total editorial
discretion over the details. Thanks are also due, in equal part, to the many colleagues
and peers who reviewed the articles that comprised this issue. We are proud to have
had the opportunity to edit this special issue focused on intercultural research from/on
South Asia. In the call for papers for this issue, we asked potential contributors to “show-
case the multiple, contested and conflicting understandings around culture, identity, and
power that inhabit the South Asian context.”One of our primary goals for this special
issue is complicating and broadening the academic discourse on South Asia. This was a
primary objective in selecting the articles that comprise this issue. As we explain below,
the six articles respond to this call in important and intersecting ways.
If critical intercultural studies in Communication refers to a set of practices that explore
how “power, context, socio-economic relations, and historical/structural forces [consti-
tute] and shape culture and intercultural encounters, relationships and contexts”(Halua-
lani & Nakayama, 2013, p. 2), then the broad rationale of this issue is to crystallize these
practices within the South Asian context. The point, of course, is not to engender some
sort of fundamental South Asian exceptionalism, but to contemplate on how the above-
mentioned set of practices are manifest within that region. Here, we recognize that we
stand on the shoulders of scholars before us –this move to de-parochialize the “inter”
in intercultural communication has a long and storied history, and we recognize the
work of the many scholars in our discipline that have allowed for the articulation of
what we are attempting here.
But first, a bit of context on terminology –the terms “Indian subcontinent”(or simply,
“subcontinent”) and “South Asia”are often used interchangeably to refer to the region that
corresponds to the nation-states of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives,
Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. However, the difference between the terms is
worth pause –the Indian subcontinent is primarily a geological term (referencing the
peninsula created from the collision between Indian and Asian tectonic plates in the Cen-
ozoic era), while South Asia is used in a political sense to refer to the contemporary nation-
states that comprise the region and the relationships among them –consider the multilat-
eral South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, or SAARC, as an exemplar for this
© 2020 National Communication Association
CONTACT Shaunak Sastry subcontinentspeaks@gmail.com
JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION
2020, VOL. 13, NO. 2, 93–97
https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2020.1745440
usage. We have used both the terms in describing our special issue, even though South
Asia is a more identifiable moniker for the region, or at least one that is more familiar
to people from the region.
So what does it mean to do “South Asian”work in the academy, and who counts as
(South) Asian? Ask any South Asian academic located in the Euro-Academy and they’ll
tell you of the discursive struggle of labeling oneself as Asian. “But you’re not Asian!,”
comes the rejoinder, because in North America, that the term is used in particularly neo-
Orientalist ways to refer to folks from China/Japan/Korea. In the same breath, both of us
see this pattern of “naming and claiming”in South-Asia focused institutions and events,
where India-centric articulations, scholarship and viewpoints come to stand for South
Asia as a whole. India is the largest and most populous country in the region, and conse-
quently, (as far as Communication scholarship is concerned), much of the scholarship pro-
duced from this region tends to be India-centric. What this means, plainly said, is that
Indian perspectives drown out voices from other contexts and spaces. Both of us have par-
ticipated in conference panels, reviewed papers and read research where we have witnessed
this conflation of India with South Asia. In planning this special issue, then, one of our goals
was to showcase research from other South Asian contexts. In our editorial decision-making,
we attempted to be conscious of this synecdochic logic of representation. We believe we are
richer for it –this decision challenged some of our own conceptions of “what counts”as
South Asia, and, indeed, as we explain below, our own orthodox conceptions of what
counts as intercultural communication. Our title, an admittedly crude pun on Gayatri
Spivak’s“CantheSubalternSpeak?(1988)”sought out interesting scholarship from the
“other South Asia(s)”.
But first, some context about the editing process. In response to the call for abstracts, we
received more than 80 abstract submissions from scholars representing a wide range of
institutions, geographical contexts, scholarly disciplines, and career stages. At this stage,
we used the criteria mentioned in the call for papers to shortlist abstracts. Admittedly,
this process was much tougher than we anticipated for several reasons, not least of
which was the quality and range of topics in the corpus of submissions. In the end, we
shortlisted ten abstracts that we felt had the most potential in terms of fit with our
vision for this issue. We invited authors of these abstracts to submit full-length manu-
scripts for peer review. Each full-length manuscript was sent to at least two expert
reviewers. This latter point bears some deliberation. Both of us were in consensus about
the need to have submissions reviewed by peers that shared local context and/or linguistic
or cultural expertise in the context of the particular. This meant compiling a long list of
scholars who worked on South Asia-related research topics across the various sub-fields
of Communication and relying on personal networks, snowball searching, and interperso-
nal goodwill to find the “right reviewer.”We knew that many of our reviewers are over-
burdened with service and we were heartened by their readiness to take an additional
review on for the success of this issue. Like in the first stage of shortlisting we chose six
(of the ten) full-length articles that best fit our vision for this special issue.
Iccha Basnyat’s(2020) article draws from an existing program of research on sex
workers and health in Nepal. Here, she demonstrates how Nepalese sex workers
perform dual identities as mothers/sex workers as a deliberate response to widespread
structural barriers to health in Nepal. While popular understandings of sex work render
it outside the realm of motherhood and familial identity, Basnyat’sfieldwork engages
94 S. SASTRY AND S. RAMASUBRAMANIAN
health communication theory in showing how the conflation of these identities is central
to female sex work agency amid structural stigma and widespread poverty. The performa-
tivity of the mother/caregiver/sex worker identity offers a potential space for addressing
economic, social and cultural barriers that sex workers encounter. This critical analysis
of health and culture in the Nepalese context is a good exemplar of cutting-edge theoretical
work from/on the global South.
Second, Hatef and Cooke (2020)offer a timely critique of the political economy of the
media landscape in a changing Afghanistan. Within their broader critique of the US Gov-
ernment’s“WHAM (short for Winning Hearts and Minds)”strategy in Afghanistan, they
focus on the “Murdochization”of Afghan media (the eponymous term for private media
conglomerates strategy of consolidation and political agenda-setting made famous by
Rupert Murdoch). Using one media conglomerate, the Moby Group as their case study,
the authors offer an insightful analysis of a media system that has been systematically
underrepresented in academic literature. While political economic critiques of neo-imper-
ialistic projects (like the US involvement in Afghanistan) are readily understood as being
within the broad framework of intercultural communication or media scholarship across
the globe, the relative lack of such work published in NCA outlets makes this piece
especially poignant within this issue. In other words, internationalizing Communication
studies in the United States also means de-parochializing its theoretical registers.
Gill and Dutta (2020) craft parallel narratives of household domestic workers across
two regional contexts: Noida, India (a suburb of New Delhi) and Singapore to highlight
what they call “multiple communicative erasures”implicit in domestic labor practices
in the region. Even as the “Singapore model”–a particularly technocratic vision of mobi-
lity and urban development –is held up as a model for many South Asian cities, Gill and
Dutta use the example of domestic worker voices to highlight the exclusions and the pre-
carity inherent to it. The parallelism is interesting: in both Singapore and Noida, house-
hold workers are primarily migrants –South Asian trans migrants from India or
Bangladesh (among others) in the former case and rural Indian migrants in the latter.
Similarly, the specter of caste violence and caste-based hierarchies loom over how dom-
estic spaces are configured across these contexts. The authors eschew the axiomatics of
postcolonial difference in favor of a critique of neoliberal transformations in Asia, and
in so doing, offer interesting questions on the continued relevance of postcolonialism as
mere difference from EuroAmerican discursive power.
Durham (2020)offers a very different treatment to the problem of postcolonial rep-
resentation in her analysis of Kala, the critically acclaimed 2007 album by MIA, the
British-Sri Lankan rapper. Here, Durham explores a critical fault line in postcolonial poli-
tics using MIA’s album as context: for all its criticisms of Euro American appropriation of
postcolonial cultural modes, what happens when postcolonial cultural products are them-
selves products of such appropriation? Enter MIA’sKala, which as Durham shows, can be
viewed both as a subversion to “war on terror”politics and an appropriation of several
postcolonial cultural products. Durham’s analysis allows for an engagement with this new-
found register of postcolonial theory.
The fifth article in the issue, by Bhat and Chadha (2020), offers a thematic analysis of
OpIndia.com, a content website in India whose raison d’etre is the allegation of “main-
stream media bias”against right-wing populist movements. Echoing the calls from
several Western populist outlets that mainstream media outlets “peddle fake news,”
JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION 95
OpIndia represents the global South avatar of this particular form of discourse. Using a
year’s worth of OpIndia’s“news”content, the authors describe some common discursive
features of this form of anti-media populism and offer important congruencies and differ-
ences from the more established literature on OpIndia’s Western counterparts.
Finally, D’Souza and Rauchberg (2020)offer a critical reading of the Indian film Mar-
garita with a Straw through the lens of queer theory and disability studies. The film, an
exploration of a queer disabled South Asian woman’s navigation of interpersonal relation-
ships, offers fertile ground for the authors to consider how disability and queerness sim-
ultaneously run together within a neoliberal governmentality, even as they individually
offer moments of rupture within the neoliberal normative order. The essay offers some
interesting insights on how both queer and disabled bodies move from the realm of
public welfare to an entrepreneurial search for the self within neoliberalism and broadens
the ambit of disability and queer studies to the South Asian context.
As is evident, the articles that were included in this issue represent a geographical
swathe of the region, including Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Singapore and India, and
the relationships these spaces forge with their particular diasporic correlates across the
globe. These connections –transnational flows of people, capital, information, and com-
modities –are perhaps as important (if not more) to contemporary theorizing around
South Asia and its place to the world, and we have tried to highlight these flows in the
pieces we have chosen. While we recognize the futility of attempting the representational
politics and geographical “coverage”of South Asia as a region, we hope that this attempt
enables a first step of a long journey.
The idea of doing a special issue on South Asia germinated through a discussion in the
summer of 2019. As we look back from that time, we realize we have learnt a lot. First, we
have both appreciated the breadth of scholarship in this area, even as we recognize that the
definitions of communication (and intercultural communication, for that matter) con-
tinue to be driven by a Euro American lens. Second, we have learnt (immensely) about
the powers and responsibilities that editors have. As we reflect on the editorial decisions
we made along the way (a first for both of us), we cannot help but think of the “ones that
got away.”Was it our lack of perspicacity that no articles from Bangladesh, Pakistan or
Myanmar made it to the list? Should we have tried harder to encourage scholars from
the area? Were our standards of what counts as “rigorous”scholarship imbued with a
specific, parochial, idea of rigor? Did our gatekeeping get in the way of our desire to be
representative? To what extent did we become the very thing we critique in our work –
the gatekeeping US-trained scholar? These are questions that we ruminate on as we
send this labor or love out into the world, knowing fully well that these questions have
no easy answers.
References
Basnyat, I. (2020). Stigma, agency, and motherhood: Exploring the performativity of dual mother–
female sex workers identities in Kathmandu, Nepal. Journal of International and Intercultural
Communication,1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2020.1735486
Bhat, P., & Chadha, K. (2020). Anti-media populism: Expressions of media distrust by right-wing
media in India. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication.https://doi.org/10.
1080/17513057.2020.1739320
96 S. SASTRY AND S. RAMASUBRAMANIAN
D’Souza, R., & Rauchberg (2020). Neoliberal values & queer/disability in Margarita with a Straw.
Journal of International and Intercultural Communication,1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/
17513057.2020.1739318
Durham, M. G. (2020). Subaltern voices and postcolonial schizophrenia: The political tensions of
M.I.A.’s Kala. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication.1–15. https://doi.org/
10.1080/17513057.2020.1735487
Gill, S., & Dutta, M. J. (2020). Negotiating the (im)mobility of domestic work: Communicative era-
sures, disrupted embodiments, and neoliberal Asia. Journal of International and Intercultural
Communication.https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2020.1739319
Halualani, R. T., & Nakayama, T. K. (2013). Critical intercultural communication: At a crossroads.
In T. K. Nakayama & R. T. Halualani (Eds.), The handbook of critical intercultural communi-
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