Jenn Thảo Nguyễn

One striking aspect of our observations of Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala – in conversation with Appiah’s monograph, Bose and Varghese’s article, and Mehta’s writing – is the question of how individuals construct their identities and subjectivities. This process of self-definition depends on clear boundaries: between the individual and the community, and between the community and larger notions of belonging. Bose and Varghese employ a compelling methodology to distill the essence of widespread critiques of Mississippi Masala concerning its supposed “poor representation” of South Asian diasporic experience. They caution against conflating two meanings of “representation”: vertreten (political representation) and darstellen (portrait or depiction). As they argue, the democratic and cultural spheres demand “different strategies of activism”. When critics collapse these distinct forms of representation, they risk producing what the authors call a “departicularization”, resulting in misguided generalizations or erroneous critiques. Binita Mehta’s chapter expands on this argument by examining the critiques of bell hooks and Anuradha Dingwaney more closely, also discussed by Bose and Varghese. Mehta contends that these critiques lose force because they fail to situate the film within the specific context of a Ugandan-Indian family migrating to Greenwood, Mississippi. This oversight neglects the way Mississippi Masala’s diasporic and exilic themes intersect with America’s historically turbulent sociological landscape – one shaped profoundly by immigration and multiculturalism.

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s monograph widens this frame even further. He explores immigration beyond the lens of capital flow, asking instead what it means to be an “American” today. Through his concept of rooted cosmopolitanism, Appiah proposes that American identity, though lacking a singular common culture, coheres around a shared political one. This political culture – grounded in liberalism and constitutional order – creates the conditions for genuine autonomy, allowing individuals to express diverse and evolving identities. Appiah’s argument stands out for its articulation of the ideological infrastructure that enables nations and states to exist. For him, rooted cosmopolitanism allows individuals to inhabit multiple cultural and national affiliations simultaneously. In this framework, grounding one’s patriotism in local culture is not only permissible but also natural in an increasingly globalized world. Appiah’s insights draw from thinkers such as Homi Bhabha, who urges a shift from binary notions of “center” and “periphery” toward the study of localities, and Stuart Hall, who observes that new subjectivities and social movement must embrace the “necessarily fictional” but indispensable closures that make both politics and identity possible. Together, these thinkers suggest that identities are fluid yet necessarily demarcated – and, to some extent, consciously chosen – shaped by shared political commitments, human diversity, and attachments to local inflections.

‘Choice’ here is the operative word – it underpins the rooted cosmopolitan’s capacity for self-construction and autonomous self-identification. Yet it becomes difficult to determine the extent to which “choice” truly exists when structural and circumstantial factors constrain the options available to the diasporic subject’s self-conception. In the context of Nair’s film, it is worth asking whether Mina and Jay genuinely choose to become “Americans” by the film’s conclusion. As Binita Mehta argues, Mina’s attraction to Demetrius is shaped by her ability to identify more easily with the Black American community than with her extended Indian family – a result of her formative years in Black Africa and the local rootedness it produced. Jay’s declaration that “home is where the heart is” emerges only after his disillusioning return to Uganda, where he learns of his childhood friend’s death and witnesses the decay of the family home he has idealized. Thus, rootedness in Appiah’s optimistic notion of rooted cosmopolitanism appears less an act of choice than a symptom of cosmopolitan condition. This tension between rootedness and rootlessness is mirrored in the film’s deliberate setting: Mina and Jay’s new life unfolds within the Monte Cristo Motel – a transient, liminal space that underscores the instability of belonging. Equally symptomatic is the transference of power structures from Jay, Kinnu, and Mina’s privileged status in Uganda – where they occupied an upper-class position relative to Black Africans – to their uneasy social positioning among Black Americans in Greenwood, as articulated by Demetrius’ confrontation with Jay. Nair’s portrayal of these dynamics exposes an oversight in Appiah’s otherwise persuasive account of rooted cosmopolitanism: his framework does not fully consider how cosmopolitan subject interacts with, and is constituted by, Foucauldian power relations, nor how these relations transmute within the increasingly integrated world of the rooted cosmopolitan.