multiplicity and meaning pools
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*took out personal anecdote cause I felt like I wrote it weird
Puar talks about the notion of contagion—about asserting subjects as agential and unregulated, rather than as mass pools of homogenous bodies with uniform viewpoints and mannerisms. It's about establishing a relational ontology, where identity is produced through autonomy and sensory interaction, rather than through a fixed, universal essence.
For Sikhs, much of their history as a diaspora has been about navigating two homogenous pools: the Muslim and the Hindu. The turban, more than just clothing, is a religious symbol that has been instrumentalized in both multicultural and racist agendas, maintaining a cruel duality between religious freedom through multiculturalism and the governance of bodies deemed "other" and in need of integration. The turban contributes to a discourse on citizenship that isolates difference more than it celebrates it, while also becoming a site of homogenization: cultural, regional, and color-coded variations are disregarded in favor of the single marker of a terrorist. Heteronormative frames are projected onto the Sikh man to portray a masculinity unlike the white man's—violent, warrior-like, yet effeminate and perversely queer—and the turban comes to encapsulate all of this:
"The sheer might of multiplicity collapsed into one stagnant pool of meaning."
This pool of meaning is rooted in fear, and it is this fear of something yet to happen that fuels the racialization, homogenization, and violence enacted on Sikh and other racialized bodies. This is the epitome of white paranoia, where the white man "is the beginning and the end of violence." "The subject is created, known, and confirmed as the body is beaten."
The Thangaraj reading hit close to home. Growing up around other brown boys, conceptions of Blackness were always something to aspire to: Blackness as a front, a language of sorts, a demeanor one could "acquire" as a means of crafting identity in a landscape dominated by the bifurcation of white and Black masculinity notions. In this environment, you see the full spectrum: kids appropriating realities they hadn't lived, claiming words they didn't flip, comparing skin tones to see who was darkest, or simply having an appreciation for Black culture, primarily though music (increasingly corporatized and commodified), as an anchor in a space that wasn't quite theirs. It also helped that every mosque had a basketball hoop set up in the parking lot.
What's interesting here is how the same collapse of multiplicity happens: the diversity and heterogeneity and historical plight of Blackness is reduced to a commodified and fetishized way of being. Kids use it as a style or a posture, but at the end of the day, they will never know what it's like to truly be Black.
I have more I want to say, but I'm not sure how to pull it all together yet
