Critique of Archived Life: Toward a Hesitation of Sikh Immigrant Accumulation

In 2016, the Pioneering Punjabi Digital Archive (PPDA) went online. Attempting to reveal how the Punjabi community struggled and then thrived in California, the PPDA accumulates narratives of Punjabi American life. Against such models of archival intimacy and recovery, which look to cultivate limitless public access to a knowable and transparent subject while reducing structural precarity to the failure of an exceptional Punjabi, this article hesitates in a vexed archival space without guarantees. Within this hesitation, it explores the traces of untimely lives displaced in creating archival legibility—traces that reveal a different form of being that challenge the additive logic of the PPDA. This hesitation is cultivated through a comparative approach that couples archival and ethnographic research based on articles about Punjabi American life in both the archive and public sphere alongside ethnographic work conducted with Sikh immigrants who work in canneries and the fields. The aim is to pause in the present impasse to consider the nonbecoming of unknown forms—an ethnographic “reaching and ungrasping” in which the future is not fixed as a requirement for thinking, refusing the accumulating demands of narrative sequence that archiving presents.

From Punjab to Peggy’s Cove: Joyful Activism in Behind the Bhangra Boys (2019)

This paper will examine how the 2019 Nancy Ackerman documentary film Behind the Bhangra Boys both deconstructs the complexities of contemporary Sikh immigrant identity in Eastern Canada and reinforces the intricacies of one’s social responsibility of being a welcome guest on the unceded territories of Mi’kma’ki, otherwise known as Nova Scotia. Following the energetic choreography and generous hearts of five young Sikh immigrants, the film reminds viewers that the protection of community and the planet is part and parcel of joyful activism, whilst following Guru Nanak’s teachings, be it along the rocky shoreline of Peggy’s Cove or the fertile farmlands of Punjab.

Masculinity in the Sikh Community in Italy and Spain: Expectations and Challenges

Since the 1990s, the Sikh community in India has entered a phase of considerable socioeconomic and demographic transformation that is caused by the large-scale practice of female feticide, the spread of higher education among women, and the mass emigration of unskilled men to the Western countries. These changes have a great impact on the traditional configuration of gender roles and disrupt the construction of masculinity in the Sikh community in India and in the diaspora. Based on ethnographic observations and 64 in-depth interviews with Sikh immigrants in Spain (26) and Italy (22) and their relatives in India (16), this paper first explores the expectations of masculinity in the Sikh community in Italy and Spain; and second, analyses the challenges that are imposed by the socioeconomic and demographic transformation in the Indian Sikh community and the social environment in the host countries on the construction of masculinity in the Sikh community in both countries.