In this article, I analyze white American performances of South Asian music as concurrent performances of racial identity. I deploy a performance studies perspective that treats the visible and audible manifestations of race as performative agents in the manufacturing of racial structures. Scholars of interracial performance such as Philip Deloria, Eric Lott, and E. Patrick Johnson have long examined the ways white Americans have used the traditional art forms of ethnic Others as a means of understanding their own whiteness in silhouette. Likewise, I here argue that the performance and consumption of Hindustani music in its American diasporic context serves as a sort of funhouse mirror, forcing white practitioners and spectators to confront their own Orientalizing impulses and thereby affording them the opportunity to do whiteness differently. This article is structured in two parts. The first follows ethnographic interviews with a white American sitar player across his interactions with South Asian collaborators and audiences; the second reverses this gaze, this time analyzing a South Asian tabla player’s performance before a white Euro-American audience. I demonstrate the ways the question of authenticity generates a productive anxiety in white practitioners and consumers of South Asian music, one that ultimately leads them to perform their whiteness differently before the brown gaze. In calling this a “performance” of whiteness, I mean that these cross-cultural transgressions go beyond making whiteness visible, as Lott and Deloria suggest, towards actually producing a different kind of whiteness, one that is in dialogue with the perspective and demands of the non-white Other.

"Narayanan writes from a deeply personal perspective as a first-generation diaspora musician with training and experience in opera, jazz, and Carnatic music. Their musical practice transcends categories of fusion or hybridity, which suggest the bringing together of fully formed musical styles. Instead, Narayanan draws from their own experience and study of other Indian-American artists to theorize “hyphenation”—in which 'multiple influences are intertwined from the outset, leading to a creative process and a musical product that stage a dialogue between cultures and genres from the moment of their inception'—as a framework for understanding the work of diaspora musicians. Their chapter, 'Music of the Hyphen: Diaspora Music as Process and Product,' takes as a case study the debut album of Indian-American mridangist Rajna Swaminathan, created in collaboration with both jazz and Carnatic musicians. Narayanan’s analysis of the album demonstrates an approach that they unpack in pedagogical comments. They criticize the simplistic binary of assimilation versus appropriation while attending to the political nuances of cross-cultural borrowing. Throughout the chapter, they ask incisive questions—twenty-three in total—that instructors can in turn pose to their own students to guide meaningful encounters with hyphenated music."

"Fischlin and Porter’s improvised utopia is firmly grounded in the disorienting realities of transcultural communication and
expression. Through this grounding, they succeed in recuperating improvisation as a place where difference is at best celebrated and at the very least respected."