Interview with Professor Fariha Khan: Understanding Her Studies of South Asian Americans and Asian American Food

I interviewed Professor Fariha Khan, who studies race, ethnicity, gender, food, and so much more. Professor Khan’s research studies Asian Americans as a whole, with a specific focus on the South Asian American experience. She also teaches numerous classes at UPenn University. Her bio reads:

“Fariha Khan is the Co-Director of the Asian American Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania where she also teaches courses on South Asians in the U.S, Asian American Communities, Asian American Food, as well as American Race. She received a Master’s degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Yale University and a PhD in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research focuses on South Asian American Muslims, Pakistani American culture, and the Asian American community. Dr. Khan was appointed in 2015 to the Pennsylvania Governor’s Advisory Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs and served until 2019. Actively involved in the Philadelphia community, Dr. Khan is Chair of the Board of the Samuel S. Fels Fund and is a member of the Philadelphia Folklore Proje and James Brister Alumni Society for the University of Pennsylvania.” (bio from UPenn Directory, photo from Professor Khan herself)

Could you talk about how you personally got involved in the field of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s studies as well as Asian American studies? What interests you about these topics and/or their intersectionality?

My PhD is in folklore and folk life, and so when I began my research, I (first) actually got a Masters at Yale in Arabic and Islamic studies. But, for some reason, it wasn’t enough for me. I really wanted to be able to talk to people to do fieldwork. This degree was primarily based on language study, which was amazing and was really informative for me in thinking through some of the questions that I was going to pursue later; but, what I would say is that I then became interested in doing a degree that was comparative with the Middle East and with South Asia.

So I came to Penn to do that. My work ended up really focusing on South Asians in the US, particularly a Muslim American community. I really worked with them post-9/11 to think about race, class, and how this particular community was making sense of their life in the US at this time.

In doing that work and research I also became interested in how women, as brand new, first-generation immigrants in the US, navigated raising children and working in a foreign country, particularly at a time when being Muslim American was very, very difficult. That’s a little bit of how my interest came to be.

And so as I did the dissertation, the work really aligned there, with these concepts, given that South Asian Americans are also Asian Americans. I had always taught, as a graduate student and then later as a professor as well, “South Asians in the US.” I’ve been teaching that course for almost 23 years. That class has changed a lot. It’s “South Asians in the US”, and that course is in the Asian American studies program.

In my more recent research, I’ve become interested in larger questions about the Asian American community. So rather than just focusing on South Asians (although studying them is a big part of my work), I also now think about Asian Americans more broadly. I also teach a course on Asian American food and the broader Asian American community. My newest course that I’ve been working on is “American Race” which involves thinking about not just race and racialization with Asian Americans or even South Asians, but across the US with multiple different communities. So, that’s how I got started in all of this work. It’s kind of like one thing led to another, and I just began building my research areas.

Can you please discuss your class “South Asians in the U.S.”? What are the specific units taught?

Sure. You may know this, but most Americans do not know very much about South Asians. And if they do, there is a very dominant discourse that all South Asians are from India. There is not a lot of recognition about the diversity within South Asia. So, I have taught this course for several years. It’s changed in terms of both the structure of the course and also the content of the course.

When I taught this course as a grad student, it was primarily a writing seminar. We did some readings on the content of South Asians in the US, but we also spent a lot of time thinking about writing. Then after another few years, I taught the course as a freshman seminar. There were only eight students taking this course at this point. That’s a different kind of dynamic than when the students are not all from the same year or all first years. At this point, it served as more of an introductory course. I

Now it’s basically a broad seminar that is open to all years, and the content has changed as well. I’ve certainly developed a lot of readings, not just on history. More recently, I’ve also added an archival piece. In Philadelphia, we have the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which is a really wonderful institution. They have a lot of archive material about the history of South Asians. So, I’ve also incorporated the South Asian American Digital Archive in the course, which is saada.org. Students have this archival piece in their work as well.

I think one of the most important things is that this course introduces everyone to the history of South Asians in the US. As I mentioned before, people just don’t know about it. In most high schools in the US, there is not much covered about Asian Americans, let alone South Asian Americans. Most people think that Indians came recently, maybe 20 years ago, and through the tech industry. There is no narrative of the reality that South Asians helped to build this country. They worked in lumber yards. They worked on the railroad. They farmed much of California alongside other Asian Americans. This is very important to know. There were Punjabi farmers in the late 1800s. They were helping build the US. So, it’s not a new history. It’s a long history, and it’s a complicated history of discrimination. South Asians’ labor was very desired, but not necessarily their lives.

And it wasn’t until 1965 that this sort of all changed with the Immigration Act. Then, the US really needed more Asian Americans to come because there was a greater need for jobs. But the course is still critical, because not that many universities even have it. I would say 98% of students coming in have not had exposure to the history of South Asians in the US.

As a follow-up question, since a lot of people come out of high school without any prior knowledge of South Asian history, as you mentioned, would you say the main demographic of the class is South Asians themselves?

My class is open to all years. I’ll be teaching it in the fall, and what I will say is that over time, the demographic has changed. Initially, when I taught it, it was almost exclusively South Asian American second-generation students. And now what I would say is it’s much more of a mix. Last year, when I taught the course, there was a graduate student auditing. There were two international students from India. Their experience is very, very different from those of their peers who have grown up in the US. We had two students from Vietnam who had grown up in the US. We had a Chinese international student. So, over the years, the class has become much more diverse.

Having said that, I would say that, yes, the majority of the student population in the course are South Asian American. But definitely, through the more recent years, there has been a lot more diversity.

Can you please discuss how your studies of ethnicity and migration work in conjunction with your research on Muslim identity and South Asians in the US?

What I’m really interested in is how people come to the US. In different cases, it’s through their pursuit of higher education, or to join a family member. The ways in which people come set up particular pathways to how they will navigate their lives.

It’s also about the relationship that the US has with the host country. So, if the country and the US had any kind of geopolitical tensions, then that person would have a very different kind of landscape when figuring out their life. Whether or not they come with particular kinds of skills, whether or not they can speak English or not, and whether or not they have family here, are all factors that create different pathways for how their life will end up. They all influence whether or not they’ll face particular kinds of challenges. That’s really interesting to me.

I want to just circle back to the question that you also asked before. When I’m thinking about my own research, I’m thinking about the questions that I’ve laid out in the class. Those questions formulate a very quick introduction to the history of South Asians in the US.

People understand that this is a longer history. This is why people were coming in the late 1800s. This is why they’re coming in 1920. This is why they’re not coming in 1930. We look at these patterns so that we understand the history.

Then, in about week three of the class, we really shift to a more thematic understanding of South Asians in the US. We do one week on religion, another week on gender, and another week on education. We try to think about why education is important to South Asian Americans.

We do another week on race and racialization, thinking specifically about time post 9/11 and these questions: how does race impact the lives of South Asians? How are they navigating this landscape of being not black and not white? So, as I explained, at this point, the class layout is more thematically organized. We also spend a whole week on marriage and dating and understanding why that is really important for this community.

What has been your proudest or most notable piece of work to date? How long did it take to write this publication or to complete this project, and what were your motivations to do so?

I am really proud of this particular chapter that came from my dissertation that was published in the Journal of American Folklore. It’s on the DARS, which is a Quranic study group that women had. I had attended that group for many months. Originally, I thought that this group had really organized religion sessions for the local women. But, I later realized that the group was really not about religion; they were all friends with each other, and it was really for them to have the space to come together to talk about their struggles and their joys. They would talk about some of these questions: How do I manage kids in high school? How do I deal with questions about my kid going to the prom? How do I respond if my daughter wants to date? So, they were not just in this space to learn or study religion, but they were really creating a space for support for each other.

Also, these women were fortunate enough not to work. They were available in the afternoon. They would always organize a potluck as well. They would bring dishes to share. They were in community with each other, and they lived near each other. They could share their hopes and dreams. And so it really was an opportunity for them to figure out their ethnicity. As I mentioned, it wasn’t just about religion, but it just began as a religious gathering. They would study together and ask each other these religious questions. But, after that was done — after that first hour was done — they would bring out these lavish dishes that they would share with each other and they would talk about their kids. They would talk about their families back home, their concerns, and so much more. It was really a gathering that connected these women as immigrant women. All of the people there were immigrant Muslim women.

Separately, the other thing I’m really proud of is my podcast, which is called “Yellow and Brown Tales” and is on Asian American Folk Life.

What are your goals for how you hope to see your research develop, specifically within the next few months or during the summer?

This summer I am working on revising the South Asian class syllabus, but also spending a lot more time on redoing my Asian American food course. I always teach “South Asians in the US” in the fall. For the past three years, I’ve been teaching this particular course called “American Race: A Philadelphia Story.” It’s about race as it impacts multiple communities. This past spring, as soon as the semester was over, we actually went with the whole class to Athens, Greece and we met with a lot of organizations that are dealing with refugees and racialization in Greece. That was really exciting. But next year, I’m going to go back to teaching an Asian American food course, and I’ll spend a lot of time in the next couple weeks rethinking that syllabus.

In your Asian American food class, do you still find the theme of gender coming up?

Absolutely yes. And I’ll tell you why. For example, the people in Asian American households who are the main ones cooking in the home are women. But, if you look at an Asian American restaurant, men are generally the ones in the kitchen. Thinking about how labor is divided in the home vs. in a public space is also really interesting.

These particular ideas that come, for example, out of South Asia about chefs or cooks are pretty male-dominated. I actually had a guest speaker who was a man, and who owned an Indian restaurant and was very successful. But, he said in his talk to the students that the best chef he knew was his wife. I said, “Oh, does she ever cook at the restaurant?” And he was like, “There is no way I would allow her to cook at the restaurant.” This is a very interesting thing to think through how labor is gendered in certain kinds of spaces. In the home, it’s gendered one way. In a restaurant, it’s gendered differently.

Also, you can think about cookbooks as another example. There are all of these websites for cooking, and they are primarily published by women. Even if you do a quick search on websites, it’s mostly women who are producing the content.

Do you have any blogs, podcasts, news articles, books, movies, or any other forms of literature relating to Women and Gender Studies that you recommend students explore?

On the Asian American Studies website at Penn, there is a link to my podcast “Yellow and Brown Tales.” that I mentioned. That’s not just specific to South Asians, but is it a little bit more broad.

Separately, I would recommend students to look at again, saada.org again, which is a digital archive and a really tremendous resource. Those are two great places, if anyone is interested to just even take a quick look through. It’s so, so interesting. On the digital archive, there are a lot of photographs, articles, and even a curriculum. If you want to study any particular topic in South Asian American Studies, people have submitted interviews, photos, or research studies of their own that people can learn from. For instance, there is this one research study on South Asian road trips throughout the US. It’s a great resource.

There are also newspaper clippings, if someone is interested in thinking about what are some of the very first publications that South Asians in the US produced. There are resources for learning about the South Asian American LGBTQ community, and so much more. There are publications, articles, photos, lesson plans, etc.

There’s another resource that saada.org has called “Our Stories.” It’s a textbook, and it’s really meant for middle school and high school students. It’s just on the basics of South Asian American history.

In terms of book recommendations, I mean, there’s a lot. I don’t actually have one book that I recommend, as I use a lot of different ones in my class. I have articles and chapters from various books. But for example, I think that there are a few books that are really strong. One is called “Karma of Brown Folk.” That’s important work.

There’s also a piece that is a chapter from a Ronald Takaki book, which is called “Strangers from a Different Shore.” It has a very nice summary of the South Asian American migration experience.

Is there anything that I haven’t brought up that you want to mention?

I just want to repeat again the fact that South Asian Americans have had a long, rich history in the US — including their labor, lives, etc. They have built this country and it is very unfortunate that most of us just don’t know that. A few high schools do have some kind of Asian American history or some sort of Asian American literature. Even at my daughter’s school, they had an Asian American literature course. Unfortunately, it was taught by someone who was actually not trained in Asian American Studies. So it’s slightly problematic because it brings into question what particular pieces the teacher picks for students to read. The danger is strengthening the stereotypes that already exist of Asian Americans. Or does the selection of readings offer a more complex view? Not all South Asians are the same.