Looking both ways : identity, intersectionality, and solidarity in South Asian American youth activism

Abstract

In this piece, I draw on a select history of South Asian American activist youth camps as a device to discuss the nuanced relationship they forged between identity politics, intersectionality, and solidarity across the last few decades. The two South Asian American political action youth camps that I examine are Youth Solidarity Summer (1997–2006 in New York City) and Bay Area Solidarity Summer (2011–present in California). The article, grounded in scholarship on critical multiculturalism and intersectionality (rooted in the legacy of Black feminisms), opens a reflection on the ways in which the evolution of U.S. politics over the last several decades has informed and transformed sites of youth organizing. Such gatherings have strategically organized around identity as an entry point into a deeper commitment to a robust solidarity. In its conclusion, the article calls attention to a contradictory relationship between identity and solidarity – especially for people of color groups that occupy ambiguous or complex locations of privilege and marginalization, and operate in environments where the category of intersectionality has been all too easily co-opted into the service of liberal multiculturalism.