Images of Ambivalence and the Photography of Unbelonging: Sikh Spaces and Communities Contemporary California
Paper Proposal for the 9th Dr. Jasbir Singh Saini Endowed Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies Conference
Theme of Conference: Precarious Futures: Sikhs and Sikhi(sm) in an Uncertain World
Conference Chair: Professor Pashaura Singh, Distinguished Professor and Saini Chair
UC Riverside, Department of Religious Studies
May 9-10, 2025
Paper Title: Images of Ambivalence and the Photography of Unbelonging: Sikh Spaces and Communities Contemporary California
G.S. Sahota, Department of Literature and Aurora Chair, UC Santa Cruz
Abstract:
This presentation stems from my ongoing photography project on the gurdwaras – Sikh sacred spaces – of California as sites of vulnerability to racist violence as well as refuge from pervasive social insecurity. Like the congregants they bring together, Sikh gurdwaras are often easily distinguishable and thus easy targets for xenophobic violence in the West, and yet they continue to be sacred spaces that offer succor and sustenance to their members, providing both tangible and intangible means for community healing, self-strengthening, and resilience. By examining this contradiction, this project contributes to intersecting movements and activities against racist authoritarianism in contemporary American society, aiming to provide a distinct vision to help foster a pluralistic, cosmopolitan culture reflective of diasporic ways of relating to different national contexts simultaneously. Working with Sikh faith leaders and community institutions, the project will ultimately result in an exhibition and accompanying text that will circulate across different communities and spaces in California, developing thereby a series of visual assets and a wider critical engagement with visuality from a minority perspective.
While images and experiences from this project will be shared, the presentation focuses on specific predicaments and dilemmas that the medium of photography conjures for minority communities, in particular. For is it not the case that photography could further exacerbate the vulnerability of easily recognizable minority communities through broad exposure? But would not excluding minority communities from the visual domain render them even more invisible as social actors and make their presence all the more one of unbelonging? What are the photographic forms and visual languages that would help give expression to these predicaments? And what kinds of curatorial practices could help a minority community fend off damaging stereotypes and secure more control of their self-presentation? What kinds of archival practices and institutional frameworks help address these concerns?
Alongside engaging with such questions in the visual realm, this presentation will also reflect on theoretical work relating to immigrant, minority, and subaltern experience in the US context. Working through Lisa Lowe’s now classic, yet still relevant Immigrant Acts (1996), this paper will lay out potential strategies for working against the limitations of nationhood and liberal containments of minority critique. Instead, it will seek to lay out ways to establish norms of cosmopolitan and diasporic belonging beyond the nation-state.
Bio
GS Sahota (PhD, University of Chicago) is associate professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz with affiliations in History, History of Consciousness, and History of Art and Visual Culture. He currently holds the Sarbjit S. Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies. His publications include Late Colonial Sublime: Neo-Epics and the End of Romanticism (Northwestern UP), which received the Mellon Foundation’s Modern Language Initiative First Book Prize in 2018, as well as articles in journals such as boundary 2, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and Sikh Formations, on whose editorial board he serves. His writing spans the fields of world literature, South Asian studies, Critical Theory, historiography, and film and media studies. As a multilingual scholar, he regularly translates from Hindi and Urdu, conducts research in Punjabi, German, French, and Spanish, and is currently learning Italian and Portuguese. Sahota is now writing his second book on the question of identity through investigations into the history of Indo-German cultural exchange and its ramifications for transnational method. As a youth he trained in documentary photography under the tutelage of the renowned Magnum photographer Matt Black while making a name for himself in the skateboarding subculture with the sale of his photographs. He held his first photographic exhibit on the Punjabi diaspora while a graduate student at the University of Chicago with special funding from the Committee on Southern Asian Studies.
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