South Asian (Mis)Representations Onscreen

In the romcom, "The Big Sick," Pakistani comic Kumail (played by Kumail Nanjiani) falls in love with Emily, (played by Zoe Kazan) who is white. The movie tells the story of Nanjiani's real life experience of falling for a woman outside his culture and ethnicity. But the film, which has gotten a lot of praise, has also gotten some backlash for its portrayal of an interracial relationship. 

In the beginning of July, writer/filmmaker, Aditi Natasha Kini, wrote an essay for Jezebel, titled, "I'm Tired of Watching Brown Men Fall in Love with White Women Onscreen." She writes, "as much as I liked [the film]—and I did—I also found myself exhausted, yet again, by the onscreen depiction of a brown man wanting to date a white woman, while brown women are portrayed alternately as caricatures, stereotypes, inconsequential, and/or the butts of a joke." Sopan Deb, culture reporter for The New York Times, recently wrote, "'The Big Sick,' South Asian Identity and Me." He explains that while he understands the frustrations of a number of South Asian women who have criticized the film, he had a very different reaction. He writes, "I didn't see 'The Big Sick' as a rejection of South Asian women, but rather a rejection of arranged marriage, a difficult and searing subject for some of us who have experienced it up close."

Kini and Deb open up about their differing reactions to the film and what they've noticed about recent South Asian American depictions onscreen.