White Utopias. Amanda J. Lucia

      WHITE BHAKTAS AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

      In 2016, Carrie Grossman (Dayashila) was disrupted during her kīrtan performance at Brown University by protesters claiming that as a white woman singing kīrtans, she was wrongly appropriating elements of Hinduism.⁵¹ The protesters were mostly white and African American students who employed the moral policing strategies of the liberal Left to confront the kīrtan artist for her expression of white privilege and her exploitation of Indian Hindu religious forms. Similarly, in 2018, the Bhakti Yoga Club at American University was disbanded after a South Asian student levied an accusation of cultural appropriation. The club had invited a troupe of white Hare Krishnas to host an “India Day” festival and perform the Indian epic the Rāmāyana. The student who levied the accusation wrote: “The sponsors of this show and the artists acted as if their actions were acceptable because they have converted to the Hare Krishna sect of Hinduism. The reality of this is that white European dancers will never know my intersectional experience as a Hindu woman, being a brown bodied person and the other aspects of systematic racism that I, as well as other South Asian people, have experienced.”⁵² This is not the first time that the whiteness of the Hare Krishnas has been critiqued, particularly because the traditional branches of the religion encourage devotees to adopt Indic cultural dress and to proselytize in public spaces.⁵³

      Importantly, the critique of cultural appropriation is deeply informed by the context of multiculturalism, wherein identity depends on the performance of ethnic and cultural authenticity. Multiculturalism may be an important valorization of diversity, but it also problematically imagines cultures as coherent and uniform wholes to be presented and represented by their members, in what political theorist James Tully has explained as “a desire for cultural uniformity” and “a ‘billiard ball’ model of cultural diversity.”⁵⁴ Along these same lines, Charles Taylor has famously argued that the politics of recognition inherent within multiculturalism “acquiesces in a stifling model of the nature of agency and its relationship to culture, or to ‘identity’ more generally.”⁵⁵ Multiculturalism demands that minority groups perform authenticity and adhere to fixed standards of cultural, religious, and ethnic identity to be recognized as full subjects. This imagined fixity of autonomous, sovereign, and authentic identities demands culturally specific performances, and essentializes and even solidifies extant cultural stereotypes. In Prema Kurien’s phrasing, it is “a multiculturalism that demands a performance of authenticity.”⁵⁶ This performance confines people of color to localized representations of cultural specificity, whereas whites are free to imagine themselves as universal, global citizens, with rights of property to all cultural and religious forms.

      In contrast, in India, where Indian Hindus are the majority, whites performing and adopting Hindu beliefs and practices does not usually pose a significant problem for Indians.⁵⁷ In popular Indian tourist centers, whites are sometimes disparaged by locals for their negative environmental impact, criminality, sexual lasciviousness, or participation in black markets, but their religiosity is rarely at the center of popular critique. In India, where Hindu religiosity is valued highly, even white bhaktas, if they are serious and devout, command respect from the general populace. One can see this in the veneration given to many of the swamīs and brahmacārīs of ISKCON—for example, Radhanath Swami, born Richard Slavin in Chicago, Illinois. Many Indian Hindus even take particular pride in their religion when they see foreigners attracted to it. In response to the protests against Dayashila at Brown University, Rajan Zed, the president of the Universal Society of Hinduism, reflected such a view, arguing that the “color of the person should not matter in devotional singing and anybody should be able [to] pay respectful homage to Hindu deities through kīrtan or other forms.”⁵⁸

      But in the United States, anti–cultural appropriation activists aim to guard against cultural exploitation of people of color. They note the racialized disparity between whites—who can embody nonwhite cultural forms while reserving the ability to discard them if and when they become inconvenient or a liability—and nonwhites, who cannot. This cultural policing is based on physical appearances, not intent, education, or experience. For the student critic at American University, it did not matter that the Hare Krishnas identified as converts to Hinduism. In her view, their whiteness and accompanying white privilege prevented them from accessing the religious and cultural forms of ethnically Indian Hindus. In the larger field of Hindu studies, such a view aligns with the Hindu ideologues of the far Right, who have argued in recent decades that Anglo-European outsiders should not represent India, Hinduism, or Sanskrit because of their outsider status, regardless of their intent or knowledge.⁵⁹

      In Western academia, many scholars distance themselves from such an authoritarian view of cultural property and justify their engagement with India and Hinduism by citing their accumulated knowledge, educational pedigree, and respect for (or even love for) Indic culture. This view extends beyond judgment based in external physical characteristics and judges validity based on interiority. As Anthony K. Appiah writes, “Cultural borrowing is great; the problem is disrespect.”⁶⁰ Such a view exempts scholars from critique yet enables them to critique white bhaktas and yogis based on the assumption that these communities are superficial in their adoptions of Indic religions. In $elling Spirituality, Jeremy Carrette and Richard King argue, “What is being sold to us as radical, trendy and transformative spirituality in fact produces little in the way of a significant change in one’s lifestyle or fundamental behaviour patterns (with the possible exception of motivating the individual to be more efficient and productive at work).”⁶¹ But Carrette and King’s assumptions about the content of kīrtan and yoga in the West are simply not validated by the teachings of some of the most influential and internationally famous teachers in the festival context. There, many kīrtan artists and yogis are highly engaged with South Asian religious traditions. Many are reading texts, attending workshops, and adopting Buddhist and Hindu devotional practices. The festival becomes an educational shared space that provides an opportunity to learn more about the various spiritual peripheries of kīrtan and postural yoga. In short, many of these participants are serious.⁶²

      But the ubiquity of white voices, even serious ones, can still create a crisis of representation wherein people of color are occluded and erased. In this vein, Roopa Singh, an Indian American woman and a founding member of the South Asian American Peoples Yoga Alliance (SAAPYA),⁶³ addressed a room of white yoga teachers tearfully with the following sentiment: “As you fill that space [of representing yoga], teach in that space, know that there is someone, who looks very much like my mother and looks very much like my father, who is not there, who doesn’t feel as confident to integrate, to be in public in this country—just know that you are taking a space that is precious.”⁶⁴ Singh speaks to the manner in which white bodies travel freely in public, universal spaces, while brown bodies are relegated to the private and the local. Cultural appropriation is, in actuality, a question of representation; it is not the root of the problem but rather an effect of systemic racial injustice.

      GOING NATIVE: BECOMING A TRIBE

      The very foundations of religious exoticism are deeply intertwined with the adoption and appropriation of nonwhite religious and cultural identities that borrow heavily from Native American traditions. Historically, religious exoticism both idealized and distanced itself from actual Native American peoples. For many, Native ways are a symbolic representation of alternative ways of being and of relating to the self and to the earth. By identifying with Native ways, the counterculture also self-identifies as being critical of discriminatory US governmental policies toward Native Americans. This identification is largely politically impotent and expresses solidarity through the adoption of Native aesthetics and spirituality rather than direct political action or protest. There are moments of attempted political solidarity, but even those can become highly problematic, for participants and witnesses alike.

      For example, in 2016–17, members of the Red Lightning Tribe at Burning Man traveled to Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota to protest in solidarity with Native Americans. They then brought Sioux and Dakota elders to the playa for a global synchronized drum circle in an initiative called the Power of Prayer.⁶⁵ In the case of Red Lightning, the village collectively identified with