The subcontinent speaks: Intercultural communication perspectives from/on South Asia

Abstract

That this special issue has seen the light of day is primarily due to the vision of Todd Sandel, the outgoing editor of the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, who readily identified the relative lack of visibility of South Asia focused intercultural communication research, suggested a special issue, and offered us total editorial discretion over the details. Thanks are also due, in equal part, to the many colleagues and peers who reviewed the articles that comprised this issue. We are proud to have had the opportunity to edit this special issue focused on intercultural research from/on South Asia. In the call for papers for this issue, we asked potential contributors to “showcase the multiple, contested and conflicting understandings around culture, identity, and power that inhabit the South Asian context.” One of our primary goals for this special issue is complicating and broadening the academic discourse on South Asia. This was a primary objective in selecting the articles that comprise this issue. As we explain below, the six articles respond to this call in important and intersecting ways. If critical intercultural studies in Communication refers to a set of practices that explore how “power, context, socio-economic relations, and historical/structural forces [constitute] and shape culture and intercultural encounters, relationships and contexts” (Halualani & Nakayama, 2013, p. 2), then the broad rationale of this issue is to crystallize these practices within the South Asian context. The point, of course, is not to engender some sort of fundamental South Asian exceptionalism, but to contemplate on how the abovementioned set of practices are manifest within that region. Here, we recognize that we stand on the shoulders of scholars before us – this move to de-parochialize the “inter” in intercultural communication has a long and storied history, and we recognize the work of the many scholars in our discipline that have allowed for the articulation of what we are attempting here. But first, a bit of context on terminology – the terms “Indian subcontinent” (or simply, “subcontinent”) and “South Asia” are often used interchangeably to refer to the region that corresponds to the nation-states of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. However, the difference between the terms is worth pause – the Indian subcontinent is primarily a geological term (referencing the peninsula created from the collision between Indian and Asian tectonic plates in the Cenozoic era), while South Asia is used in a political sense to refer to the contemporary nationstates that comprise the region and the relationships among them – consider the multilateral South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, or SAARC, as an exemplar for this