The glory of the British empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was often associated with the phrase ‘The sun never sets on the British empire’. It was a statement of pride and celebration and the book under review by leaving the second half of the phrase has raised questions about historical continuities and contemporary relations of global power. The book forcefully argues that the contours of imperialism has changed and shifted over the course of the 20th century and territorial empire of the British has given way to the spread of US led globalization. In their collection of articles on South Asian diaspora in the US, in a refreshing approach the authors bring forth the idea that the increasing flows of people, money, goods, culture and ideas between South Asia and the United States has to be seen in the context of this shift and United States’s long-standing and ongoing military, geopolitical and economic pursuit in the region.
This is also a work of a generation of scholars whose essays track changes in global power and the migration experiences of different categories of people which includes Indian farmers, seamen and radicals who sought work in the US in the 1910s, Indian nurses who reached the shores of the United States thanks to the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation during the Cold War to post 9/11 detainees and deportees caught in the mess of George W. Bush’s in (famous) war on terror. These studies are interesting because there is a shift in the orientation of South Asian American studies from a largely literary and cultural analysis focussing on changes in immigration laws in the 1960s to a much neglected analysis focussing on the political economy of migration and continuities between British imperialism and US led globalization.
The collection is divided into three parts. The first part, the ‘Overlapping Empires’ consisting of three chapters deals with a period in history—late nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century which is often overlooked because of the wide scope and immigrant exclusion and this collection of essays fills that gap academically. The second part entitled ‘From Imperialism to Free Market Fundamentalism: Changing Forms of Migration and Work’ draws a connection between the neo-liberal globalization and migration for both capital and labour. It shows how both these factors have been impacted by liberal globalization and how new circuits have developed over the years. The final part ‘Geographies of Migration, Settlement and Self’ deals with some key spatial categories, relationships and locations that inform studies of South Asian migration and circuits of US power.
Nayan Shah’s essay focuses on South Asian migration in the early years of the twentieth century. They had to come up against both British and US spheres of power as they made their journey across the globe to the United States and they had to navigate the surveillance and border regimes that both countries were constructing in parallel and in concert—in Calcutta, Singapore, Suez, the Philippines, Hawai, Panama and Belize. Interestingly as Shah points out, ‘despite Britain’s pretensions to universal and egalitarian membership within the empire,
colonial subjecthood was similarly a subordinated and disenfranchized status when it came to both movement within the empire and migration to other nation states such as United States’ (p. 44). Seema Sohi’s chapter on race and anti- colonialism points out the contradictions in US policy as the global defender of liberty and equality and the special relationship it maintained with Britain as manifested in its cooperative surveillance efforts and repression of Indian anticolonialism. In fact American diplomats were aiding to forbid any Indian with anti-British leanings from leaving India and then encouraging immigration officials to use the anti-anarchy law to prevent the landing of those who made it to U.S. immigration stations (p. 57). Vivek Bald’s essay on ‘Desertion and Sedition addresses a major gap in South Asian American historiography and challenges a number of assumptions about South Asian presence in the US during the early decades of the 20th century. By looking at the case of Indian Seamen through archival records, the author points out that South Asian migration was not limited to the West Coast and was not brought to a halt by the landmark 1917 Immigration Act. Indian seamen were a significant presence in the East Coast cities in the 1920’s and they constituted an independent and under-examined arena of nationalist activity.
Indian nurses constitute an important part of the South Asian migration to the US and in a an important essay, Sujani Reddy redraws the framework by looking at the issue from another angle rather than focussing on the Hart Cellar Immigration Law as the most important factor which led to the arrival of nurses in the US. She brings into focus the critical role played by the Rockefeller foundation (RF) under the aegis of British colonization in promoting India’s first generation nursing leaders through their access to US centred models of professionalization. But RF’s ‘focus on professionalization positioned itself against state sponsored plans that focussed on addressing the massive health needs of a population that was emerging from long term, systematic colonial neglect’ (p. 119) The chapter shows the disjuncture between the version of professionalized nursing promoted by the the RF and the reality on the ground in the mid twentieth century.
It is a long road from imperialism to free market fundamentalism. The second part of the book deals with the changing forms of migration and work and the three essays bring together various issues under this category in a refreshing manner. Miabi Chatterji discusses the managerial issues of control in the service sector and convincingly argues that ‘family is not just a convenient metaphor but a managerial tool that attempts to privatise economic relations and screen them from public view and regulation’ (p. 129). By using the family discourse, managers resist legal regulation and using informal hierarchies that are based on race, national origin, gender they prevent enforcement of standards. She also points out that both Latino as well as South Asians experience the same or parallel treatment and conditions of work in the service sector.
Adding on to the literal space of the home and households as a critical space Our Feet Walk the Sky (1993), Dragon Ladies (1997), A Patchwork of Shawl (1998), Body Evidence (2007), Linta Varghese’s essay questions the analytical scalar units of the national and transnational that undergrid contemporary theorization of diaspora. There are other smaller scales such as community organizations and the household and by bringing in these concepts what the author attempts to do is to have a different view of the gendered notions of the private and public. Immanuel Ness looks at Hyderabad and tries to see the global and internal labour migration. It is a well recognized fact that liberalization of India’s economy has created a division between the wealthier sections who benefit out of this and the growing number of workers who find themselves pushed into poverty. Through a radically disparate narrative outlined in the chapter, Ness questions the notion that all is well propagated by the MNC’s and the Indian capitalist class, and argues that ‘market based economy neglects basic needs as sanitation, clean water, electricity, medicine and food for the majority of population’ (p. 196) Amanda Ciafone’s essay shows that water shortage disproportionately affects weaker sections like landless labourers, dalits etc. and by challenging Coca Cola’s water use, villagers in Mehndiganj enacted environmentalism of the poor which is similar to the struggles around the world for environmental justice and against environmental racism. The transnational networks of activism and solidarity linked distant groups such as village farmers, workers, consumers, investors and articulated a broader critique of the Coca Cola Company and neo liberal corporate globalization. The artistic intervention of the Visible Collective, discussed by Naeem Mohaiemen, in ‘When An Interpreter Could Not Be Found’ recounts the experience of Muslim and South Asian immigrants who had to face the policing and hyper surveillance of the state.
The third part of the book deals with diverse topics such as domestic violence, Queer diaspora, Shia migration and Pakistani return migration and imperial incarcerations. Soniya Munshi’s essay on domestic violence among South Asian communities goes beyond the dynamics of intimate violence in the micro political realm to focus on state, institutional and community based responses to domestic violence. She argues that ‘recontexualising domestic violence within a broader understanding of violence can open more possibilities for transformational politics that do not locate solutions in state responses that further violence in communities like policing and incarceration/detention’ (p. 268). Gayathri Gopinath joins the other anthropologists working on sexuality such as Mark Johnson, Peter Jackson and Gill Herdt in calling for a new queer regional studies that centres on global south in her essay ‘Who’s Your Daddy ‘. She also uses the particular regional logic of gender and sexuality in Kerala and shows that region as a sub-national formation has a complicated and contradictory relation to both the nation and the global.
There is little to dispute the fact that there has been a general climate of Islamohobia in the broader US sphere post September 2001. Raza Mir and Farah Hassan in their empirical work on the Shias in the US shows that this has produced new tensions within the community. They conclude that ‘ the greatest challenge to the community emerges not so much from its ability to deal with cultural heterogeneity across its immigrant congregations but from heterogeneity of economic class, which plays out in subtle ways in the cultural dynamics of its rituals’ (p. 303). Junaid Rana’s essay connects the working class Pakistani migrants in New York largely made up of young, lower middle class men who entered the economies of US cities in the 1980s and 1990s as the labour pool for the service sector, with the state action in the aftermath of the World Trade Centre attacks. This brings into focus the post 9/11 state policies with its gendered and racial dimensions and ‘labour migrants live an extreme form of the tenuous existence in the current global economy while unprotected by the states of global capitalism’ (p. 342).
Too often, the architecture of the war on terror has been described as unprecedented. Manu Vimalassery’s final essay works against this argument by looking at the history of imperial prisons and tries to find precedents for the US war on terror. By bringing the example of imprisonment of indigenous people at Fort Marion, Manu argues that it is a precedent for the current prison of Guantanamo. Manu succinctly concludes that ‘the stark visibility of US global power in the early twenty-first century should prompt us to examine settler colonial power as it continues to animate and structure U.S. claims to legitimate sovereignty, over and against the autonomy and self determination of indigenous communities within its self proclaimed borders’ (p. 367).
One of the major contributions of this volume has been to understand the lives of the migrants differently. Rather than repeating the story of migrants coming into the US to seek freedom submerging everything else about the US especially the slavery of the past and police brutality at the margins against the marginalized, these essays show that if the context is widened, the migrants’ story can be told differently. The work in this anthology looks at the diaspora within the context of imperialism and neoliberlism and this will open up the possibility of its utility and limitations of its use as it configures certain conceptions of movement, settlement and the attendant negotiations with power. This volume is a must read for anybody remotely interested in the international lives of the migrants from South Asia.
P.A. Mathew,currently the Director of FISAT Business School, Cochin, Kerala, has a doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University and has worked at Christ University, Bangalore and Symbiosis International University.