The Sun Never Sets presents the work of a generation of scholars who are shifting the orientation of South Asian American studies. In its early years, the field centered on literary and cultural analyses and focused predominantly on the immigrant professionals who arrived in the United States after changes to immigration laws in the 1960s. Here, the contributors focus on the political economy and long history of South Asian migrations to the U.S.—and upon the lives, work, and activism of often unacknowledged migrant populations—in ways that not only challenge preconceptions about the South Asian presence in the United States, but illuminate continuities between British Imperialism and U.S.-led globalization. These essays track changes in global power that have influenced the paths and experiences of migrants—from the Indian farmers, seamen and radicals who sought work and refuge in the U.S. in the 1910s to Indian nurses sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation during the Cold War to the post-9/11 detainees and deportees caught in the crossfire of the “War on Terror”.
Vivek Bald is Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Miabi Chatterji is the Co-Director of Grants at the RESIST Foundation. She received her PhD in American Studies from New York University.
Sujani Reddy is Five College Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies in the Department of American Studies at Amherst College.
Manu Vimalassery is a Visiting Assistant Professor in American Studies at Williams College.
Vijay Prashad is the Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut, Beirut (Lebanon).
Acknowledgments Introduction Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery
Part I. Overlapping Empires 1 Intimate Dependency, Race, and Trans-Imperial Migration Nayan Shah 2 Repressing the “Hindu Menace”: Race, Anarchy, and Indian Anticolonialism Seema Sohi 3 Desertion and Sedition: Indian Seamen, Onshore Labor, and Expatriate Radicalism in New York and Detroit, 1914–1930 Vivek Bald 4 “The Hidden Hand”: Remapping Indian Nurse Immigration to the United States Sujani Reddy
Part II. From Imperialism to Free-Market Fundamentalism: Changing Forms of Migration and Work 5 Putting “the Family” to Work: Managerial Discourses of Control in the Immigrant Service Sector Miabi Chatterji 6 Looking Home: Gender, Work, and the Domestic in Theorizations of the South Asian Diaspora Linta Varghese 7 India’s Global and Internal Labor Migration and Resistance: A Case Study of Hyderabad Immanuel Ness 8 Water for Life, Not for Coca-Cola: Transnational Systems of Capital and Activism Amanda Ciafone 9 When an Interpreter Could Not Be Found Naeem Mohaiemen
Part III. Geographies of Migration, Settlement, and Self 10 Intertwined Violence: Implications of State Responses to Domestic Violence in South Asian Immigrant Communities Soniya Munshi 11 Who’s Your Daddy? Queer Diasporic Framings of the Region Gayatri Gopinath 12 Awaiting the Twelfth Imam in the United States: South Asian Shia Immigrants and the Fragmented American Dream Raza Mir and Farah Hasan 13 Tracing the Muslim Body: Race, U.S. Deportation, and Pakistani Return Migration Junaid Rana 14 Antecedents of Imperial Incarceration: Fort Marion to Guantánamo Manu Vimalassery Afterword Vijay Prashad
Index About the Contributors