a bimonthly publication of
progressive south asian politics
Volume 6: Number 1 December 25, 1995
Volume 6: Number 1 December 25, 1995
| Editorial |
| Roots: A Manifesto For Overseas South Asians Vijay Prashad |
| Peelay Paiyon Ki Nayi Ummeed or Reshaping Immigrant Identity Politics Biju Mathew |
| Making Room for a Hybrid Space: Reconsidering Second-Generation Ethnic Identity Sunaina Maira |
| Look Ma! The Sangh Giroh's gone progressive! (and Newt's a Revolutionary!) Niraj Pant |
| FOIL |
Taxi-vala/Auto-biography is an experimental documentary which explores a complex range of issues within New York s growing South Asian communities. The work takes as its point of departure the intersection between a second-generation, bi-racial Indian- American (the video maker), and a group of recent immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh who drive taxicabs, twelve hours a day, six to seven days a week, on New York s city streets.
Taxi-vala shuttles between the stories of these immigrant drivers and the self-critical reflections of the video maker, combining Hi-8 video with Super 8 film, color with black-and-white, real-time with slow motion, and straight talking-heads interviews with abstracted images of the New York cityscape. While the drivers relate experiences of migration and displacement, economic and political struggle, and their quest for the elusive and illusory American Dream, the video-maker charts his own personal quest for community with the drivers through the making of the documentary itself. In so doing, the video-maker raises questions of cultural, generational, and class difference within the South Asian diaspora, and explores his own silences with the drivers around issues of sexism and inter-group racism. Taxi-vala is a fast-paced and complex look at South Asian New York.
Taxi-vala/Auto-biography premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art s Fall 1994 exhibit, From India to America: New Directions in Indian American Film and Video and has since been shown at the Asian American International Film and Video Showcase (SF), Chicago Asian American Film Festival, Desh Pardesh (Toronto), and Asian Cinevision s Videoscapes (NY).
For screening and ordering information please contact: Vivek Bald,
145 East 26th Street, #5B, New York, NY 10010. Tel: 917-424-8200.
