Race, Religion, Revolution: Genres of South Asianness in the Americas

Moving against the historical homogenizing impulse of Asian American studies, this panel celebrates the messy and convoluted ways that writers, artists and scholars navigate the racialization of “Asian-ness” in the Americas. The various erasures stemming from homogenisation obscures the potential that thrives within cross-racial and cross-ethnic solidarities. A turn to South Asian/American decolonial and anti-imperial approaches offers some relief: frameworks of kinship beyond structures of nation and ethnicity; Islamic spiritualities grounded in inter-communal intimacies; and Asian American positionalities constituted within an orientation towards solidarity. Examining various genres of poetry, visual media, and newspapers, this panel reassesses configurations of “Asianness” beyond the familiar echoes of racial triangulation.
With a nod to Sara Ahmed’s claim that “‘orientation’ itself has a colonial underlying,” this panel leans into a type of South Asian American re-orientation that questions stringent requirements of “how we inhabit spaces as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we inhabit spaces with” (2006). How must we critically examine the construction of the South Asian figure in U.S. 19th century narratives? How do Muslim writers expand modes of racialization within Asian American literatures? What do pop-culture representations of South Asianness challenge and/or uphold imperialist identity formations? What can we learn from South Asian feminist poetics to craft Asian American belonging and community that transcends nation-state borders? This panel forefronts pathways for developing decolonial and anti-imperial practices of knowledge production through an exploration of narrative and scholarly tapestries that challenge the boundaries and limits of Asian American Studies.