Racial Formation in the Post-September 11 Era: The Paradoxical Positioning of Working Class South Asian American Youth

Racial Formation in the Post-September 11 Era: The Paradoxical Positioning of Working Class South Asian American Youth
Author: Veena Hampapur
Publisher:
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN:

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In this dissertation I aim to show that there has been a shift in racial formation in the United States since the terrorist attacks of September 11th. I chart this new racial formation through theorizing from the everyday realities of working class, predominantly Muslim, South Asian and Indo-Caribbean youth in New York City, some of whom were undocumented. By utilizing ethnographic methods, I dissect their seemingly contradictory lived experiences of 1) national belonging stemming from multicultural comfort in a city famous for its diversity and 2) exclusion from cultural citizenship dictated by struggles with modes of racialization, surveillance, and criminalization more commonly associated with Arabs, Blacks, and Latinos. I map out the current racial formation, which explains South Asians' paradoxical positioning, through examining the intersection of state policies with intersubjective and emotional experiences of race and racism. I find that South Asians' seemingly contradictory positioning is produced through three mechanisms of the current racial formation: the emphasis on diversity and pervasiveness of color blind ideology; shifting notions of race that criminalize widening domains of difference, especially religion and immigration status; and national security panics centered on youth, terrorism, and crime. I demonstrate how multicultural belonging, color blind ideology, and racial exclusion -- despite their apparent contradictions -- shape cultural citizenship and function together as a means of social control in the 21st century. Analyzing the paradoxical position of South Asians, as the country moves toward becoming a majority minority nation, can lead to revelations about race and racism, their connections with cultural citizenship, and their relations to power beyond a single scale. Understanding racial formation after September 11th provides the possibility to learn about race more broadly -- including its continued significance and its evolution during times of war, nativism, and coalition building.

Backlash: South Asian Immigrant Voices on the Margins

Backlash: South Asian Immigrant Voices on the Margins
Author: Rita Verma
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2019-02-11
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9087906846

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This book presents yet another compelling argument about the lives and struggles of new immigrant youth in public schools and demands the attention of educators, policy- makers and academics. In the post September 11th political, economic and social climate there are silenced and forgotten young immigrants in our schools.

Missing

Missing
Author: Sunaina Marr Maira
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2009-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822392380

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In Missing, Sunaina Marr Maira explores how young South Asian Muslim immigrants living in the United States experienced and understood national belonging (or exclusion) at a particular moment in the history of U.S. imperialism: in the years immediately following September 11, 2001. Drawing on ethnographic research in a New England high school, Maira investigates the cultural dimensions of citizenship for South Asian Muslim students and their relationship to the state in the everyday contexts of education, labor, leisure, dissent, betrayal, and loss. The narratives of the mostly working-class youth she focuses on demonstrate how cultural citizenship is produced in school, at home, at work, and in popular culture. Maira examines how young South Asian Muslims made sense of the political and historical forces shaping their lives and developed their own forms of political critique and modes of dissent, which she links both to their experiences following September 11, 2001, and to a longer history of regimes of surveillance and repression in the United States. Bringing grounded ethnographic analysis to the critique of U.S. empire, Maira teases out the ways that imperial power affects the everyday lives of young immigrants in the United States. She illuminates the paradoxes of national belonging, exclusion, alienation, and political expression facing a generation of Muslim youth coming of age at this particular moment. She also sheds new light on larger questions about civil rights, globalization, and U.S. foreign policy. Maira demonstrates that a particular subjectivity, the “imperial feeling” of the present historical moment, is linked not just to issues of war and terrorism but also to migration and work, popular culture and global media, family and belonging.

South Asian Racialization and Belonging after 9/11

South Asian Racialization and Belonging after 9/11
Author: Aparajita De
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2016-05-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1498512534

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This collection of essays interrogates literary and cultural narratives in the contexts of the incidents following 9/11. The collected essays underscore the new and (re)emerging racial, political, and socio-cultural discourse on identity related to terrorism and identity politics. Specifically, the collection examines South Asian American identities to understand culture, policy making, and the implicit gendered racialization, sexualization, and socio-economic classification of minority identities within the discourse of globalization. The essays included here relocate the discourse of race and cultural studies to an examination of transnational labor diasporas, reopen debate on critical constructions of U.S. racial and cultural formations, and question the reconfiguration of gendered and sexualized discourses of the South Asian diaspora within the context of national security and terrorism. This book provides a multifaceted account of South Asian racialization and belonging by drawing from disciplines across the humanities and the social sciences. The scholars included here employ methods of ethnographic studies as well as literary, culture, film, and feminist analysis to examine a wide range of South Asian cultural sites: novels, short stories, cultural texts, documentaries, and sports. The rich intellectual, theoretical, methodological, and narrative tapestry of South Asians that emerges from this inquiry enables us to trace new patterns of South Asian cultural consumption post-9/11 as well as expand notions and histories of “terror.” This volume makes an important contribution to renewing scholarship in the key areas of representations of race, labor, diaspora, class, and culture while implicating that there needs to be a simultaneous and critical dialogue on the scope and reconnections within postcolonial studies.

We Too Sing America

We Too Sing America
Author: Deepa Iyer
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 162097326X

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"Powerful...Iyer catalogues the toll that various forms of discrimination have taken and highlights the inspiring ways activists are fighting back. [She] is an ideal chronicler of this experience." —The Washington Post The nationally renowned racial justice advocate's illumination of the ongoing persecution of a range of American minorities In the lead-up to the recent presidential election, Donald Trump called for a complete ban on Muslims entering the United States, surveillance against mosques, and a database for all Muslims living in the country, tapping into anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim hysteria to a degree little seen since the targeting of South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh people in the wake of 9/11. In the American Book Award–winning We Too Sing America, nationally renowned activist Deepa Iyer shows that this is the latest in a series of recent racial flash points, from the 2012 massacre at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, to the violent opposition to the Islamic Center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and to the Park 51 Community Center in Lower Manhattan. Iyer asks whether hate crimes should be considered domestic terrorism and explores the role of the state in perpetuating racism through detentions, national registration programs, police profiling, and constant surveillance. Reframing the discussion of race in America, she “reaches into the complexities of the many cultures that make up South Asia” (Publishers Weekly) and provides ideas from the front lines of post-9/11 America.

The Sun Never Sets

The Sun Never Sets
Author: Vivek Bald
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2013-07-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 081478643X

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The Sun Never Sets collects the work of a generation of scholars who are enacting a shift in the orientation of the field of South Asian American studies which has, until recently, largely centered on literary and cultural analyses of an affluent immigrant population. The contributors focus instead on the histories and political economy of South Asian migration to the U.S.—and upon the lives, work, and activism of specific, often unacknowledged, migrant populations—presenting a more comprehensive vision of the South Asian presence in the United States. Tracking the shifts in global power that have influenced the paths and experiences of migrants, from expatriate Indian maritime workers at the turn of the century, to Indian nurses during the Cold War, to post-9/11 detainees and deportees caught in the crossfire of the “War on Terror,” these essays reveal how the South Asian diaspora has been shaped by the contours of U.S. imperialism. Driven by a shared sense of responsibility among the contributing scholars to alter the profile of South Asian migrants in the American public imagination, they address the key issues that impact these migrants in the U.S., on the subcontinent, and in circuits of the transnational economy. Taken together, these essays provide tools with which to understand the contemporary political and economic conjuncture and the place of South Asian migrants within it. Vivek Bald is Assistant Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. Miabi Chatterji received her PhD from New York University in American Studies. She serves on the Board of Directors of the RESIST Foundation and works with non-profit organizations such as NYUFASP, a group of NYU faculty working for shared governance at their institution. Sujani Reddy is Five College Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies in the Department of American Studies at Amherst College. Manu Vimalassery is Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University.

Terrifying Muslims

Terrifying Muslims
Author: Junaid Rana
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2011-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822349116

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Ethnographic research in Pakistan, the Middle East, and the United States helps to explain how transnational working classes from Pakistan are produced in the context of American empire and its War on Terror.

Desis Divided

Desis Divided
Author: Sangay K. Mishra
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: South Asia
ISBN: 9780816681150

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For immigrants to America, from Europeans in the early twentieth century through later Latinos, Asians, and Caribbeans, gaining social and political ground has generally been considered an exercise in ethnic and racial solidarity. The experience of South Asian Americans, one of the fastest-growing immigrant populations in recent years, tells a different story of inclusion--one in which distinctions within a group play a significant role. Focusing on Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi American communities, Sangay K. Mishra analyzes features such as class, religion, nation of origin, language, caste, gender, and sexuality in mobilization. He shows how these internal characteristics lead to multiple paths of political inclusion, defying a unified group experience. How, for instance, has religion shaped the fractured political response to intensified discrimination against South Asians--Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs--in the post-9/11 period? How have class and home country concerns played into various strategies for achieving political power? And how do the political engagements of professional and entrepreneurial segments of the community challenge the idea of a unified diaspora? Pursuing answers, Mishra argues that, while ethnoracial mobilization remains an important component of South Asian American experience, ethnoracial identity is deployed differently by particular sectors of the South Asian population to produce very specific kinds of mobilizing and organizational infrastructures. And exploring these distinctions is critical to understanding the changing nature of the politics of immigrant inclusion--and difference itself--in America.

"I Like Going Places"

Author: Anandini Dar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2014
Genre: South Asians
ISBN:

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This dissertation examines how ethnic youth centers and other sites between the home and the school inform the everyday and political geographies of working class South Asian immigrant youth growing up in a post 9/11 New York. Caught between no longer being young children and not yet adults, the teens of this study spend much of their time in liminal spaces of youth centers, streets, malls, which I refer to as third spaces. Based on a multi-sited ethnography at one youth center for South Asian youth in Queens, New York between 2010 and 2012, I accompanied teens attending this center to other places where they hang out, such as, rallies and social justice and political workshops in NYC and other neighboring northeastern cities, malls, parks, subways, and online sites. Additionally, I analyze discourses of the mission, philosophy and ideologies of the youth center programs. After the 9/11 attacks on the world trade center in New York, ethnic and religious identities, that is, being South Asian and Muslim, have become racialized and politicized categories wrongfully associated with terrorism, resulting in racial bullying and hate crimes affecting South Asian youth and families. Unlike literature on youth centers, this research highlights how, in this era, ethnically-based youth centers address these socio-political and cultural difficulties youth face everyday and help them connect with and negotiate their socio-political realities without insulating or "islanding" young people. I argue that it is in third spaces that youth's political identities and engagement with politics begin to take shape as they attend social justice workshops and rallies to fight against racial crimes, and aspire to "go places, " socially and politically. Further, I argue that youth's political agency manifests in their cultural and performative practices, offering new ways through which to understand young people's political lives. This dissertation highlights the connections between context, young people, representations, and politics, as it situates the constructions of racial and ethnic identity as intersecting dynamics to understanding youth's political geographies. This multi-disciplinary study contributes to South Asian studies, political geographies, ethnic studies and children and youth studies scholarship.

Unraveling the "Model Minority" Stereotype

Unraveling the
Author: Stacy J. Lee
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2015-04-18
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0807771163

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The second edition of Unraveling the "Model Minority" Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth extends Stacey Lee’s groundbreaking research on the educational experiences and achievement of Asian American youth. Lee provides a comprehensive update of social science research to reveal the ways in which the larger structures of race and class play out in the lives of Asian American high school students, especially regarding presumptions that the educational experiences of Koreans, Chinese, and Hmong youth are all largely the same. In her detailed and probing ethnography, Lee presents the experiences of these students in their own words, providing an authentic insider perspective on identity and interethnic relations in an often misunderstood American community. This second edition is essential reading for anyone interested in Asian American youth and their experiences in U.S. schools. Stacey J. Lee is Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Up Against Whiteness: Race, School, and Immigrant Youth. “Stacey Lee is one of the most powerful and influential scholarly voices to challenge the ‘model minority’ stereotype. Here in its second edition, Lee’s book offers an additional paradigm to explain the barriers to educating young Asian Americans in the 21st century—xenoracism (i.e., racial discrimination against immigrant minorities) intersecting with issues of social class.” —Xue Lan Rong, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “Breaking important new theoretical and empirical ground, this revised edition is a must read for anyone interested in Asian American youth, race/ethnicity, and processes of transnational migration in the 21st century.” —Lois Weis, State University of New York Distinguished Professor “Clear, accessible, and significantly updated…. The book’s core lesson is as relevant today as it was when the first edition was published, presenting an urgent call to dismantle the dangerous stereotypes that continue to structure inequality in 21st century America.” —Teresa L. McCarty, Alice Wiley Snell Professor of Education Policy Studies, Arizona State University Praise for the First Edition! "Sure to stimulate further research in this area and will be of interest to teachers, teacher educators, researchers, and students alike." —Teachers College Record "A must read for those interested in a different approach in understanding our racial experience beyond the stale and repetitious polemics that so often dominate the public debate." —The Journal of Asian Studies “Well written and jargon-free, this book…documents genuinely candid views from Asian-American students, often laden with their own prejudices and ethnocentrism.” —MultiCultural Review