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Locating the Dialogical Self in the Age of Transnational Migrations, Border Crossings and Diasporas Sunil Bhatia and Anjali Ram Culture Psychology 2001; 7; 297 DOI: 10.1177/1354067X0173003

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Commentary

Abstract We begin by outlining that the dialogical self may be conceived from the point of view of the self-ful and the self-less perspectives. Both these perspectives of self-work involve different assumptions about what should be the starting point of the I-position of the dialogical self. These assumptions need to be made explicit because they provide the key to explaining how I- positions get transformed in the process of entering into a dialogical relationship with the other. Furthermore, we argue that in order to explain how dialogue occurs, and how the I-positions are organized and reorganized by the individual, a developmental framework may be necessary. We believe that the dialogical model is extremely relevant in the age of transnational migration and diasporic cultures. However, the challenge, for the theory of a dialogical self, is to explain how individuals living with hybridized and hyphenated identities in borderland cultures and diasporic communities coordinate their incompatible and often conflicting cultural and personal positions. Key Words acculturation, cultural identity, dialogical self, diaspora, South Asian

Sunil Bhatia Connecticut College, USA Anjali Ram Roger Williams University, USA

Locating the Dialogical Self in the Age of Transnational Migrations, Border Crossings and Diasporas

We live in an age where transnational immigration, border crossings and global media are proliferating at an increasing rate. Further inten- sified by the issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality, discussions about the self challenge the grand narratives of the stable, bounded, contained, Cartesian self. Hubert Hermans’ previous work and his present essay (2001) have important impli- cations in a world where migrants, refugees, exiles and expatriates are redrawing the cartographies of the self. Hermans’ (2001) paper is, in many ways, a grand crystallization of his many decades of work on the concept of dialogical self. Generally Culture & Psychology Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol. 7(3): 297–309 [1354–067X(200109) 7:3; 297–309; 018668]

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speaking, his work attempts to study how culture is embedded in self, and vice versa. One major emphasis of his theory of the dialogical self is that neither can the concept of self be treated as atomic, bounded and self-contained, nor can culture be analyzed as an abstract, reified entity. In keeping with the goals of the special issue of Culture & Psy- chology, Hermans paints the broad and subtle theoretical strokes of the dialogical self from an interdisciplinary palette. In fact, Hermans’ paper lives and breathes the concept of dialogicality from beginning to end. He has fashioned a theory of the dialogical self by carefully and thoughtfully juxtaposing the voices of theorists from psychology (social, clinical, developmental), brain sciences, anthropology, soci- ology and literature. A primary concern of Hermans’ paper is how one should go about the business of theorizing about the dialogical self in a global, trans- national culture. One cannot, according to Hermans, speak of a static, core, unchanging self when there is so much dynamic movement, shifting and mixing around its cultural boundaries. The challenge for the theory of a dialogical self, then, is to explain how individuals coordinate their incompatible and often conflicting cultural and personal positions in the wake of transnational immigration, cultural dislocation and the hybridization of identity. Let us begin with the central concept of the paper—the dialogical self. Hermans puts together the pieces of the dialogical self by drawing on James and Bakhtin. By integrating Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony, multivoiced- ness, with James’ notion of the self as continuous, distinct and pos- sessing volition, Hermans attempts to bridge together two distinct epistemological perspectives on self—perspectives that have been recently described by Valsiner (2000) as self-ful and self-less.

Making Meaning in a Self-ful and Self-less World The self-ful perspective maintains a clear opposition and demarcation between the self and the other, whereas in the self-less perspective, the person is essentially fused or merged with the social world. To an extent, James’ concept of the volitional, intentional I represents the self- ful perspective. The self-ful I is the glue that holds together Bakhtin’s multiplicity of selves that are discontinuous and fused with the other. This does not mean that James did not emphasize the multiplicity of selves, but rather he ensured that the I (self-as-knower) retained its continuity and distinctiveness. Valsiner (2000) argues that the two notions of self—the self-ful and self-less perspectives—point to differ- ent processes of meaning making about the self and other.

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The self-ful perspective emphasizes the social and cultural em- beddedness of the person, but at the same time finds it necessary to retain the notion of the self as a distinct ‘open system’. The self-less perspective, on the other hand, emphasizes the mutual constitution of the self and culture, but coalesces the self with the cultural artifacts and discourses that surround it. Hermans skillfully generates a theory of a dialogical self by working with both these perspectives of self. However, one point that Valsiner (2000) has drawn our attention to is that these two different perspectives of self work with different assumptions about what constitutes the starting point of the I-positions in the dialogical relations between self and other. If we take the epistemological viewpoint of the self-ful perspective, then the person becomes the ‘axiomatic’ starting point of the dialogi- cal process. Valsiner (2000) notes that without the ‘obligatory’ under- standing of one’s own life space or I-position, it would not be possible to take the perspective of the other. He clarifies this point by suggest- ing that: The notion of I-position entails a core ‘I’ that is needed to assume an I- position. In any activity, there is an agent whose active role makes the activity possible. No matter how extensively socially embedded is an activity, or discourse—the stage for that is set by the existence of the person(s). The person—who constructs I-positions—does that from the starting point of some specific location within one’s psychological field. (p. 6) One implication of such a claim is that the minimal starting point needed for the creation of a meaningful dialogical relationship between two individuals (e.g. I and You) is their distinct sense of personhood or their unique I-positions. An ‘arena for dialogue’ can only be created when one approaches the arena from one’s ‘ego-centered base’. The result of entering into a dialogue from such an I-position is that it allows for the creation of a new whole that incorporates both these positions into a third position. Valsiner (2000) explains: Two positions—A and B[—]enter (state 1) into a dialogic relationship from their ego-centered bases. By entering into that relationship, they set up the arena of their dialogue (State 2). The result of such relation may be a new whole that incorporates the previous two positions/persons (State 3A, or phenomenologically—’I and you together as We’), or one that creates a new center eliminating the previous positions (State 3B, or phenomenologically— ’We that supercedes You and I’). (p. 7) The above quotes clearly spell out the minimal starting point of the I- position from a self-ful perspective. By yoking the Jamesian notion of I with Bakhtin’s notion of the polyphonous Me, Hermans works with two radically different selves. However, if one were to take Bakhtin’s

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notion of the self as discontinuous, seamless and embodying the self- less perspective, it would be necessary to specify the minimal starting point of the I-positions of the self. An explicit description of the I- positions of the self is absolutely necessary for explaining how the dialogue occurs between two persons. The self-less perspective of dialogicality does not allow us to identify or mark the boundaries between the self and other. If the self is seamless and one with the other, and if there is no description of the unique subjectivities or I-positions of the self, then how would one know how the I-positions underwent transformations? The mutual interdependence between the self and other prevents us from knowing what exactly happened in the dialogical process. What kind of a dia- logical relationship is created when the I-positions are, in a sense, already fused with the I-positions of the other? For Hermans, the Jamesian I (self-as-knower) seems compatible with the Bakhtinian self as multiple because the latter acts as an ‘other’ to the former self, and vice versa. However, one can imagine many occasions when one inter- nalizes the perspective of the other so deeply that such a fusion creates pathology and paralysis. For example, an adult’s identification with his mother is so strong that ultimately it is her ‘voice’ that decides what kind of a woman he will marry. Her voice not only ventriloquates through his, but finally takes over his own voice and becomes the voice that decides the fate of his life. Hermans’ dialogical self allows for both continuity and discontinuity of the self, but it may be important to specify the conditions under which the individual is both able and unable to negotiate between the I-positions of continuity, stability, oneness, and discontinuity, instability and plurality. For instance, charting the ontogenetic and phenomenological conditions under which an individual’s I-positions show both continuity and disconti- nuity would be important because such conditions tell us what parts of the self have remained permanent and what parts have changed after we have entered into one or many dialogical relations with the other. The notion of dialogicality, whether one uses a self-less and/or self- ful perspective, also begs the question about what criterion one must use for establishing dialogicality. Is there a specific criterion one can use to suggest that one form of dialogicality with the actual or the imagined other is, in developmental terms, a higher or more advanced state than other forms of dialogicality? Is one form of dialogicality more developmentally stable than other forms? If so, how would one stipulate such a developmental goal? Can the other (e.g. wife, husband, group, society, country, God) force us to recognize what is an optimal

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form of dialogicality, and if so, what are the consequences of deviating from such a rigid, forcefully stipulated criterion of dialogicality?

Development and the Dialogical Self One of the most important contributions of Hermans’ work on the dialogical self is that conflict, hierarchy, misunderstandings and dis- agreements are considered an integral part of the dialogical relation- ship. For Hermans, dialogical understanding does not mean that all the voices involved in communication with self or others are always in a harmonious accord with each other. Rather, the dynamic move- ment between I-positions involves negotiation, disagreement, power, negation, conflict, domination, privileging and hierarchy. He describes five types of dialogicality—two-way internal sharing, one-way internal sharing, external sharing, non-sharing-internal area and non- sharing external area. These forms of dialogicality serve as an effec- tive analytical device in mapping out how dialogical discrepancies can arise between different external and internal I-positions. However, from a developmental point of view, it would be fruitful to speculate about which of these five forms of dialogical discrepancies can be categorized as leading towards the Jamesian I of stability, oneness, continuity or the Bakhtinian self of plurality, uncertainty and discon- tinuity. Recently, Valsiner (2000) has discussed the various forms of dialogi- cality involved in the development of the dialogical self—some ‘voices’ moving towards stability (e.g. mutual infeeding, polyphonization), other voices toward instability-bound forms of dialogicality (e.g. mutual escalation of oppositional voices, neutralizing different voices, dominating, expropriating, ventriloquating). For example, in the stability-bound concept of ‘mutual infeeding’, one voice might say, ‘Life is good’ and the other might say the exact opposite, ‘Life is bad.’ Such mutual opposition between voices, however, does not cancel or negate them, but instead they dynamically reverberate within the self, giving ‘stable feedback to each other’. These voices circulate within the self in the form of a dynamic loop. Such forms of dialogicality, where the oppositional voices feed into each other, are integral to maintain- ing the development of one’s sense of stability. Similarly, Hermans argues that the I-positions move in an imaginal space creating dynamic fields in which ‘self-negotiations, self-contradictions and self-integra- tions’ lead to various meaning constructions of self. But the evolution and development of these I-positions with respect to these dynamic fields remains to be clarified. How are the novel I-positions created?

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What happens to the old I-positions when new ones are formed? How do the I-positions develop? Perhaps one way to explore these dynamic fields of self-develop- ment is to investigate how these various external and internal I- positions are hierarchically integrated and differentiated with respect to a cultural goal or a telos (Werner & Kaplan, 1963). Kaplan (1966) points out that Werner believed that, ‘insofar as development occurs in a process under consideration, there is a progression from a state of relative undifferentiatedness to one of increasing differentiation and hierarchic integration’ (p. 661). Such a definition involves two strands of thought: on the one hand, this definition implies that one has to ‘posit’ what one means by normative or ideal development; and, on the other hand, after one has a definition of development, one has to figure out whether factors such as ‘historical, evolutionary, ontogenetic and other changes’ conform to or deviate from such a definition (Kaplan, 1966, p. 662). Such a definition of development many prove to be useful within the context of I-positions because it provides us with some way of under- standing how individuals foreground and background their external and internal I-positions. How are the I-positions integrated and differ- entiated and organized and reorganized in the self-system with respect to a developmental endpoint? Hermans notes (p. 254) that there may be some I-positions that may have been relevant at some point in an individual’s past but no longer hold any importance in the present so they are relegated to the background of his/her system or they may be erased completely (e.g. some people lose their playfulness at a certain age). Similarly, he notes, it is also possible that a particular I-position of our past is foregrounded and used in a present state because it has suddenly become relevant to our life circumstances (e.g. an older person experiencing a growing affinity with children after an adult life of work and stress). Such back-and-forth movement of I-positions within a self, if examined from a developmental teleology, may give us clues about how I-positions and their mutual relations are affected by the mixing and moving of cultural positions (Bhatia, in press-b). The juxtaposition of personal positions and cultural positions forces us to ask whether we need a minimal amount of shared history and culture to have a meaningful and ‘genuine’ dialogical experience. What happens when individuals with radically different cultural positions fail to establish any form of dialogicality? Who carries the psycho- logical burden of such a failure? Can one enter into a developmentally higher form of a dialogical relationship with the unfamiliar and strange other? Can one participate in a ‘genuine’ or stable form of a dialogical

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relationship with the other even if one has known the other a long time but has found its essence, self-habits, disposition, to be disdainful and repulsive? Are all forms of dialogical relationship inherently unequal and always structured by visible or invisible asymmetrical power relationships? These questions assume crucial significance when raised against the backdrop of increasing globalization, the rapid creation of multinationals, massive flows of transmigration and border crossings. In the next section, we consider the contribution of Hermans’ theory of the dialogical self in relation to how immigrants grapple with multiple positions and voices as they negotiate a space in-between different cultures.

Dialogical Voices and Diasporic Selves Hermans and Kempen’s (1998) concept of culture as mixing and moving has been pivotal in understanding how the acculturation of non-western diasporic immigrants in western societies involves an ongoing negotiation with multiple voices and positions that are con- nected to issues related to race, gender, imperialism and power (Bhatia, in press-a; Bhatia & Ram, 2001). The United States is a case in point where state-sponsored immigration, naturalization and citizenship laws were historically based on racist ideologies and can be considered as having played a crucial role in shaping and defining the I-positions of several non-western, non-European immigrants. When a new immi- grant—whether Caribbean, Chilean, Chinese, Indian, Mexican or Viet- namese—enters the United States, he or she is introduced to the stories, legacies and the immigration heritage of his or her respective ethnic group. In this process, it is reasonable to conclude that a Chinese immi- grant’s selfhood could be intertwined with the larger American story of ‘yellow peril’ or as part of the present story of being a ‘model minority’ (Bhatia & Ram, 2001). Kondo (1996) analyzes how the memory of the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in World War II and emblematic cases such as the beating to death in June 23, 1982 of Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American engineer, by two white unemployed autoworkers represent the con- tested notions of community and home as experienced and narrated by many Asian immigrants. More recently, the case of Wen Ho Lee, who was accused by the FBI of spying for the Chinese government, reasserted the perception in the Asian-American community that they still labor under racialized and discriminatory practices. Through personal and collective remembering, tales of discrimination, hard- ships and sheer exploitation are kept alive in immigrant communities.

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Many of these narratives are circulated as unofficial histories of immi- grant communities and are intimately bound up with the formation of an individual immigrant’s identity. Increasingly these accounts are being recorded by immigrant and diasporic writers through autobio- graphical narratives, memoirs and novels (Alexander, 1996; Anzaldua, 1987; Maira & Srinath, 1996; Rushdie, 1991). In addition to struggling with the asymmetrical cultural positions and oppressive political discourses in the host culture, many immi- grants are entrenched in a tangle of contradictory discourses related to home, tradition, community, nation and loyalty. The South Asian diaspora in the United States, for example, embodies such contradic- tory voices, positions and locations. Two recent books, The Karma of Brown Folk by Vijay Prashad (2000) and Passport Photos by Amitava Kumar (2000), have addressed their predicament of living as desis (Hindi word for natives of South Asia) in America. Both these books highlight, among other issues, the point that being a part of the South Asian diaspora involves complex negotiations with the racial politics of the American culture and the sense of ‘India’ that is imported from the homeland. They illustrate how the idea and essence of India or Pakistan that is kept alive in the midst of our diasporic communities is homogeneous, static and ahistorical. Prashad (2000) notes that ‘desi “culture” is treated as an ahistorical trait, a fetish, that must be in- habited to avoid being suspect of cultural treason’ (p. 124). Similarly, Kumar (2000) notes that South Asian ‘diasporic articulations’ often imagine Indian culture in a way that neglects its heterogeneity and diversity (p. 168). There are many reasons for keeping the notion of Indian or Pakistani culture as ‘traditional’, ‘pure’, ‘ancient’ and ‘spiritual’ in the diaspora. Dasgupta (1998) points out that one reason why outdated customs still continue to persist is to reaffirm the mainstream image of the South Asian community as a ‘model minority’ (p. 5). For example, many diverse groups of Indian immigrants (battered women’s society, gays and lesbians, and taxi drivers) are often not included as part of the image of ‘Indian culture’ that community members want to ‘brandish’ to the American society. Several scholars studying issues related to diasporic identity note that South Asian women are often the victims of the community’s attempt to present itself as a spiritual, traditional and a homogeneous group with ancient cultural roots. Dasgupta explains: ‘The main casualty of our communities’ efforts to reformu- late homogenous “authenticity” are women. . . . South Asian women in America are given the task of perpetuating anachronistic customs and traditions’ (p. 5). Thus, scholars examining the construction of

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South Asian women in the diaspora argue that particularly second- generation South Asian-Americans are struggling to ‘know’ their place in the society (Mani, 1994). On the one hand, they have to face racial discrimination and prejudice as ‘brown’ minority women from the larger American society; and, on the other hand, they have to deal with the oppression within their own communities. What these scholars are essentially pointing out is that acculturation of many non-white, non- European/Western immigrants, especially women, to US society is a painful, difficult and complex process. Their acculturation process occurs at the intersection of race, gender and nationality and represents the different personal and cultural I-positions of the diasporic self. For many first- and second-generation South Asian women in America, the discourses about identity are often marked by a push- and-pull phenomenon where oppositional voices about ‘America vs India, West vs East, Modernity vs Tradition’ are an integral part of their selfhood (Mani, 1994, p. 34). Such voices form a paradoxical situation, and are well illustrated in the following account by Naheed Hasnat (1998), a Pakistani-American:

Such a catch-22! Your class mates do not think you are American enough, and your parents think you’re too Westernized. At school you are the strange brown kid trying to fit in. At home you are forgetting your cultural customs, beginning to like fried chicken more than chicken tikka choosing to speak English over Urdu. (p. 35)

Notice that, for Hasnat, home and school become the sites where the cultural differences between ‘being a Pakistani Muslim’ and ‘being an American’ are contested. Hasnat’s identity struggles are manifested through the voices that tell her to be an American in one context and a Pakistani and a devout Muslim in another. However, one sees the dialogical negotiations being undertaken on several fronts: home, language, customs, food, and so on. Such forms of dialogical negoti- ation where one dynamically moves back and forth between opposite I-positions are very typical of the literature on second-generation South Asians. These negotiations are multi-layered and complex because the voices of parents, peers, language, siblings, homeland and American society are all represented in the dialogical self. Hasnat’s remarks above highlight the point that her ongoing and simultaneous dialogical negotiations with her own Muslim com- munity and the larger American society go beyond just being torn between two cultures. Her battles with her family, the Muslim com- munity and the American society represent a dialogical negotiation that is more than a push–pull phenomenon. Rather, being both

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American and Pakistani, however discordant, creates a symbiotic relationship of ambivalence. One can feel such constant ambivalence and still continue to function, because the two dialogical processes live off each other in a dynamic loop. This is not to say that ambivalence in this relationship is not painful and filled with zones of loss and alien- ation. Rather the ambivalence becomes the basis for the negotiations between the different parts of the self. The ambivalence may shift from one part to many other sub-domains or sub-parts and become the voices that help constitute a dialogical process of polyphonization (see Valsiner, 2000).

Mediating the Dialogical Self in the Diaspora Hermans concludes by etching out spaces and directions for future research related to the dialogical self. He suggests that, contrary to cross-cultural researchers’ preoccupation with cultural ‘cores’, a dia- logical perspective would consider cultural peripheries and contact zones where cultures bleed and permeate into one another. Crucial to such encounters and infiltrations is the role played by the mass media and new communication technologies. In other words, the emergence and extensiveness of electronic innovations raise important questions with regard to the construction and reconstruction of the self. In a similar vein, Giddens (1991) argues that the transnational flows of media products allow the global to be staged within the local, and vice versa, so that what was once distant now intrudes into everyday con- sciousness. Recent research undertaken by Naficy (1993), Lum (1996) and Ram (1999) exemplifies Hermans’ point that the media produce and rotate meanings and practices, and thereby reconstitute self and identity. Naficy (1993) discusses how the Iranian diasporic community use Iranian television as a source for resisting cultural messages both of the dominant American ‘host’ culture as well and of the culture of the ‘homeland’. Consuming Iranian television in Los Angeles allows Iranian immigrants to engage in a ‘double relationship to location: physically located in one place while dreaming of an unrealizable return to another’ (p. 17). Similarly, Lum (1996) focuses on the role of karaoke in constructing identity in Chinese America. He demonstrates how Chinese immigrants use karaoke to perform and express their hybrid and polyvocal identity. Lum explores how karaoke is imagina- tively employed and adopted in the diaspora, where older singing tra- ditions and rituals are reclaimed in a ‘contemporary diasporic and technological environment’ (p. 53). In other words, the practice of

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karaoke in the Chinese diaspora constructs a dialogical space where voices of tradition and modernity converge to produce new under- standings of the self. Ram (1999) examines how the self is mediated in the South Asian diaspora. She explores how popular Indian cinema is implicated in the mediation of national identities in the Indian diaspora. The practice of watching Indian cinema in the diaspora provides immigrants with sites where narratives of cultural identity can be grafted and then actively reconstructed. Such research foregrounds Hermans’ sugges- tion that the dialogical self can be conceptualized in dynamic terms where the I fluctuates and moves among ‘different and even opposed positions’. Consuming media from the cultures of their origin in the diaspora allows immigrants faced with the ruptures, displacements and dislocation of migration to construct a space where multiple I- positions interact. These positions act as characters representing voices related to homeland, community, hostland, tradition, modernity, past, present, and so on, which interact and negotiate with each other. Living as we are in an age of accelerated media technologies that encourage a collapsing and coalescing of cultural worlds, Hermans’ theory urges us to consider the dialogical self as integrally bound up with electronic transnational mediation and the transformation of space and time being wrought by communication technology.

Conclusion Given the erosion of the rational, stable, bounded self, it can be very tempting to embrace a postmodern world-view where pastiche, per- formance and play are privileged and any knowledge claims that attempt to define the self are violently rejected. In contrast, while Hermans scaffolds his theory with notions such as polyphony and plurality, he never succumbs to a shorthand, nihilistic postmodernism. Rather, he navigates skillfully between modernist and postmodernist conceptions, keeping alive both the self-ful and self-less perspectives, and gives us a powerful working model of the self. With its extensive and detailed conceptualization of the dialogical self, Hermans allows us to construct, rather than simply deconstruct, a notion of the self that is sophisticated and complex enough to be extremely relevant in the contemporary global, transnational and fluid economy. The dialogical self as theorized by Hermans is significant precisely because of its extensive interdisciplinary reach, its ability to challenge traditional understandings of self and culture, and its capacity to speak to our global zeitgeist. The ‘true’ core unitary self may be inaccessible

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or even irrelevant. However, Hermans’ theory allows us to appreciate multiplicity and dynamism without losing sight of continuity and unity, and provides us with a mind-expanding, subtly articulated and deftly argued understanding of the self.

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her place. In The South Asian Women’s Descent Collective (Ed.), Our feet walk the sky (pp. 32–36). San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Press. Naficy, H. (1993). The making of exile cultures: Iranian television in Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Prashad, V. (2000). The karma of brown folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ram, A. (1999). Mediated nationalist and gendered identities: Representations and readings of popular cinema among Asian Indian immigrant women. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Ohio University, Athens, GA. Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary homelands: Essays and criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta. Valsiner, J. (2000, June 23–26). Making meaning out of mind: Self-less and self-ful dialogicality. Paper presented at the First International Conference of the Dialogical Self, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Werner, H., & Kaplan, B. (1963). Symbol formation: An organismic-developmental approach to language. Mawah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Biographies SUNIL BHATIA, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development at Connecticut College. His research focuses on articulating how the development of personhood is closely intertwined with issues of language, morality and culture. His ongoing research program examines the acculturation issues of children and families of the South Asian diaspora living in the US. His work has been published in the Journal of Moral Education, Human Development and Narrative Inquiry. ADDRESS: Sunil Bhatia, Box 5474, Department of Human Development Connecticut College, 270 Mohegan Avenue, New London CT 06320, USA. [email: [email protected]]

ANJALI RAM, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communications, Roger Williams University. Her research explores how Indian cinema is implicated in the constitution of gendered and national identity in the Indian diaspora. She has presented several papers on feminist media theory, ethnography and diaspora studies at national and international conferences. Recently, she has published an essay in Mediated Women: Representations in Popular Culture (edited by Marian Myers, Hampton Press, 1999) and co-authored an article with Sunil Bhatia in the journal Human Development. ADDRESS: Anjali Ram, Roger Williams University, Old Ferry Road, Bristol, RI 02809, USA. [email: [email protected]]

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