Panel description: This panel reframes conventional scholarly, pedagogical, and public-facing conversations about South Asian American histories and memories through a focus on inclusion and exclusion as they mark the stories we tell. In response to the conference theme’s invitation to engage with a “focused and intensive treatment of South Asian American Studies” that situates “South Asian Americans and South Asian nations at the center of our (inter)disciplinary inquiries,” the papers presented here center immigrant South Asia, but do so in ways that decenter the conventional dominance of India and Hinduism in public discourses about South Asia. They take up questions about memory, politics, labor, religion, and unequal citizenship in vivid new ways; in the process, they transform received understandings of the historically changing forms of raced and gendered identities in the global diasporas that make up Asian/American Studies.

Approaching our South Asian American communities from diverse disciplines, this panel gathers scholars and writers that illuminate inclusion/exclusion through the stories they tell about minority experiences and activism in Asia and North America. Thus, the panel’s presentations examine labor immigration and the intellectual history of the Ghadar Party, belonging reimagined in the Nepali American diaspora, feminist Sikh American memoirs about secularized Sikhism, and Chinese-Indian diasporas’ hidden experiences of inter-Asian war and internment.

As such, the panel resonates with two key topics enumerated in the conference theme: “Contextualizing/Interrelating Oppressions” and “How the Global & Transnational relate to Asian America.” By affirming an intersectional lens to the diverse histories under discussion, attending to the politics of race, gender, religion, and class as they disclose hidden stories about struggle, solidarity, and imagining change in South Asian America. The panel is intentionally created to bring together faculty and graduate colleagues in the field, from a range of departments as well as public and private institutions from across the United States.