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I really appreciate messy stories about gay people of color, especially when the majority of counterculture literature or imagery in the West chronicles white people. I remember reading Buddha of Suburbia and Crying in Hmart in high school and feeling liberated and inspired by their aimless drug and sex-addled alternative queer Asian lives. Even though I would never wish distress upon anyone like the kind Habib and Ali had to suffer at the hands of their own families, I think it's necessary to see these flawed immigrants be flawed or sexual or complicated, see them make bad choices and lead non-traditional lives but still be considered worthy. I myself need to know and see that it's possible to fuck up and still end up okay... I think we know by now that representation is not enough but it's still very valuable for people who need some help imagining the possibilities...

Bilge's work on sexual nationalism reveals that the meaning/reputation of sex is manipulated by the state to serve its imperial interests. Up until recently, the Orient and the Islamic world were depicted as sexually depraved, rife with polygamy, abuse of women, homosexuality, and effeminacy by the West in order to justify the colonization of it. Today's characterization of the Islamic world still involves the purported mistreatment of women but with a masculinized, sexually repressive coloring instead of an emasculated one. This is perfectly suited to complement the West's new position endorsing liberated female sexuality and homosexuality as markers of democracy instead of decadence (because the state realized that the sexually deviant can be productively valuable too). Through these paradoxical constructions of sexuality, it becomes clear that women's bodies are vessels to project onto ideas of humanist progress that are inherently tied to imperial/nationalist agendas.

Having eluded the same ethnic persecution that Sri Lankan Tamils faced, Indian Tamil immigrants to Quebec tend to come from more stable, upper-class backgrounds. More wealthy and well-connected, they are better primed for upward mobility in their new North American context and accordingly pursue English, a language thought/known to offer more gainful returns, over French. Sociopolitically, Indian Tamils also seek to differentiate themselves from the criminal or terroristic associations of the "tamoul" popular in the white Quebecois imagination and deriving from the distortion of Sri Lankan Tamil revolutionary efforts amidst the Sri Lankan Civil War. It seems many Sri Lankan Tamils also share the desire to distance themselves from their Sri Lankan Tamil identity, in part for the same reason of avoiding racist, violent characterization but more likely because of disidentification from a nation that persecuted them. I think of the difference between two members of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in the mainstream: M.I.A. and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan. M.I.A. whose father was an LTTE revolutionary and who herself vocally advocates for Sri Lankan Tamil rights, frequently and proudly identifies as Sri Lankan. Born in 1975 and raised in Jaffna, she was old enough to directly experience and remember the civil war, forging a kinship to the nation despite/amidst the persecution. Meanwhile, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, born 2001 in Mississauga, prefers to identify as Tamil Canadian or simply Tamil over Sri Lankan Tamil. Her distance from Sri Lanka is twofold with whatever trauma inherited from her refugee parents translated into putting aside the Sri Lankan identity entirely, likely enforced by the derogatory Western conception as well.

Though Iranian-American, Bahman's experience studying abroad in Jordan fulfilled a sense of a return to home aided by familiar Islamic imagery, landscapes, and soundscapes, reminders that he and his family would have ordinarily rejected and associated with the home they spurned. He expresses the catharsis of finally being able to align with the majority, where your cultural background does not have to be explained because it is the standard, where you are not immediately identified as an other. I remember feeling a similar catharsis traveling to Japan. Though it was not my country of origin, being surrounded by foods and cultural symbols that felt close enough to what I grew up with and people who looked like me made me feel a sense of effortless belonging that I'd never experienced in any Western country. But this catharsis was also founded on a superficial basis, and I remember my grandma, having experienced the cruelties of the Japanese occupation, criticized us for visiting and giving money to Japan. The historical and racial contexts of these two personal experiences are wildly different but just as many of the interviewed Iranian-Americans and their immigrant parents expressed disdain for the Iranian/Islamic homeland, what is revealed is that the diasporic individual is inherently hypocritical and forever confused. The longing for belonging/home is a valid impulse but baby want bottle so badly that they lose criticality, mistaking one boob for another!

When describing the physical appearances of oriental bodies, colonial ethnographers oscillated between language that conveyed disgust and desire. The former is easier to comprehend from the perspective of a colonizing body that needs to justify its disdain and mistreatment of its colonized. The latter is more riddled with the complications of sexual desire. The "Other-bodies" being described with sensual language were almost always male, and Larochelle argues that this choice was twofold: first, in their principal othering, oriental men were sufficiently removed from the world of their white observers that any sexualization "remained on the level of allegory" and thus became an admissible, or at least less governed, vehicle for expressing homosexual desire (Larochelle 141). Second, redirecting the object of the colonial male gaze from the sexualized female "Other-body" was intended to minimize the risk of miscegenation or hybridization. Both motivations came from the overarching imperative to preserve a racially pure, heteropatriarchal reality.

Prior to these readings, I was unaware of a precedent of Syrian migration to North America, that they could even be considered the first Arabs to have done so. I wonder to what degree my ignorance could be attributed to just that (my ignorance) or to the success of Syrian assimilation. All the readings emphasized that Syrian immigrants to the US and Canada argued for non-Asiatic, white recognition and were varyingly granted it. Their Christian status, which was further tied to the Greek or Russian Orthodox (two ethnic groups further along the white status come up) with substantial institutional power in the West, certainly helped Christian Arabs enter at higher rates than their Muslim compatriots. Asal also provides the example of Challenger victim Christa Corrigan McAuliffe whose parents' anglicized names concealed their Arab origins. It seems that across the many generations, much of the Syrian population intermarried and anglicized to the point of disappearing from the modern conscious.

In Fun^Da^Mental's music video for "Dog Tribe," white working-class men commit racially-motivated violence, white upper-class men (the disinterested politician) practice negligence, Asian men suffer and retaliate, and Asian women (or more like woman) mourn. The sole female figure represented in "Dog Tribe" takes the form of a young veiled Asian woman dressed in black kneeling in front of a grave implied to hold another victim of a hate crime. Her character exists simply to look beautiful and mournful, to grieve quietly and passively while the men take on the valiant responsibility of retributive justice. She is confined to the graveyard sitting in one position amongst the flowers forever, to wallow over the consequences of some injustice without ever being able to do anything about it. Meanwhile, her male counterparts are free to come and go as they wish, taking their moment to grieve but returning to the living world to tangibly enact change. While "Dog Tribe"'s call for revolutionary anti-racist violence is necessary, it's clear that, while they may be useful as a pathos-invoking tool of the revolution or a beautiful reprieve from the political (i.e. Sonya Aurora Madan), women are not included in the concept of a revolutionary.

Marcus Garvey's Black American Islam emphasized black empowerment through entrepreneurship and "amassing earthly power" (Curtis 49). Perhaps recognizing the capitalist system that prevailed in America, his idea of achieving black freedom involved amassing capital within the black community and it follows that he was staunchly anti-communist. Meanwhile, Malcolm X's enlightenment post-conversion to Nation of Islam involved an understanding of the ravages of imperialism and capitalism worldwide (he describes Western imperialism in Africa, India, China, etc.), offering a more critical and politically-backed distaste for the white world than Garvey or Noble Drew Ali were able to (so far as the reading details). In general, Malcolm X's faith in the NOI was more pragmatic than mystical as with Noble Drew Ali's earlier NOI predecessor, and I wonder how much of this owes to the difference in educational material available to them as a result of generational circumstances. Malcolm X had the benefit of an experimental rehabilitation center stocked with a wealthy man's library of history and religion, whereas Noble Drew Ali's texts and theology/ideology seem only to reference (read: plagiarize) largely esoteric religious interpretations and derivations.

South Asian restaurants grew popular in postwar Britain thanks to ex-colonial men and lower to middle-class young men who wished to assert an identity contrary to their situations. For the young men, frequenting cheap curry restaurants was a form of rebellion against the stuffy traditions of their parents' generations and also an attempt to feel a sense of power over another when their lower economic standing demoralized them. ‘“The waiters would all be dressed up in sort of white shirts and dickey bows, and be very servile sort of in nature,” Taylor recalled, “and young people used to think, I suppose, they were a bit important, going to a place where the waiters were very servile” (Buettner 154). British men of the older generation who worked in the subcontinent and had since returned patronized higher class “Indian” restaurants in search of something similar though more tangibly nostalgic, to reminisce on the treatment more so than the food that their middle class socioeconomic status afforded them in India but no longer did back home. “Diners who wanted to be treated like “sahibs” again by attentive “native” servants and cooks had come to the right place. Veeraswamy’s allowed diners who had “been out East... to eat again a real curry and remember the days when they were important functionaries on salary instead of ‘retired’ on pension” (Buettner 149). These British men were grasping for a sense of power in post-colonial times and Indian restaurants became a site to enact their fantasies. It was an assertion of masculinity if social/economic subjugation is considered emasculation. In the process, many of these restaurants run and staffed by men changed to accommodate the tastes of their white customers, while South Asian women were left with the responsibility of preserving the authenticity and culture that their male counterparts had forsaken, specifically within the confines of the domestic realm.

It's interesting that what ultimately commutes Dom Sing's sentence is Verma's angle of Sing's inherent masculinity as given by his marital status, specifically catered towards the Western sensibility. "Verma emphasizes the wife’s ‘‘miserable condition’’ and her ‘‘cries for help’’ because she was without means of male support and would become destitute" (Shah 128). A damsel in distress is conjured to remind the court of Sing's patriarchal responsibilities, that he, too, is an honorable man like any other with a woman/family to provide for. This institution of Christian/moral monogamous heterosexual marriage so inherent to colonialism and white supremacy is used to reinstate the reputation of the non-white man and essentially undermine the white man's dignity in the process.

"At the same time, American women drew upon the cache of meanings that surrounded Oriental goods to challenge the propriety of the Victorian era; as the century came to a close, the American “New Woman” marked her independence and liberation by owning, wearing, and displaying goods that conjured Western ideas of a sensual and exotic East. By this time, a wave of popular writing about interior design promoted a scaled-down version of upper-class decorative styles to middle-class American women. Unable to furnish multiple themed rooms, women of lesser means were encouraged to combine several themes in a single room. They could “stuff the entire world into their parlors, confident that this was au courant.” Oriental goods thus became a marker of class status, and a vehicle of class striving, at multiple levels of society." (Bald, 18-19).

This past fall reading break, some friends and I roadtripped to the small lakeside town of Muskegon, Michigan where my roommate's extended family lived. The house we stayed in had belonged to their old family friend who maintained that the house and all its belongings remained as is. Needless to say, we snooped around aggressively and found all sorts of relics and stuff. In the old passports of the woman who had resided there were stamps dating across the 20th century from places like Thailand, Bengal, India, Burma, China, Japan, and other names that we may now consider archaic. These travels manifested in postcards of the Taj Mahal, Japanese prints, and Chinoiserie displayed around the house. At my friend's grandmother's house two doors down, we were shown scrolls of Buddhist charcoal rubbings from Thailand. On our drive back from Michigan, we stopped for lunch at another friend's grandma's house in Kitchener and her house was also filled with Chinoiserie and "exotic" art.

Maybe I'm just not frequenting the homes of old white ladies that often but I was kind of surprised by this phenomenon even though I knew of it in its various extents. Both my friends' grandmas and the family friend were white women of recent upper middle class origins during the 20th century instilled with the motivation to put their wealth towards worldly pursuits and delights. They were part of a generation of women who, thanks to newly acquired familial wealth, increasing globalization, and shifting cultural expectations, were able to forge more autonomous and empowered existences through travel and vicarious exoticism, “to push beyond domestic constraints—to assert their connection to a wider world” (Bald 18). The characteristics of exoticism, as through the feminizing of the Orient, conveniently coincided with the "New Woman" and thus construed to be a sort of white feminism. The sensuality of exoticism/Orientalism, the independence of travel, the intellectual and material wealth of being interesting and interested in "the world"—the pursuit of these notions clearly reflected the autonomy, individuality, and social mobility 20th century/post-Victorian white women eagerly sought at the same time that it was superficial and harmful to the people being exotified and othered. I am sorry though... because this post discusses nothing of these implications on the topical Bengali peddlers...

Rajiv claims he is learning Hindi to connect with his culture and Indianness as embodied by his grandmother, but even this is a compromise. "Hindi was the closest thing to Aji's Bhojpuri, which she called Hindustani, that I could find taught in study abroad programs" (Mohabir 34). His main interest and objective seems to be to preserve his Aji's songs and "live in the world of Aji's music," many of which are work songs related to the duties of labor his indentured ancestors had to perform in the Caribbean and the melancholy of their forced migration (Mohabir 26). Thus the very nature of his pursuit of language learning lies not in Indianness but in Indo-Caribbeanness. Though certainly offensive, Rajiv's professor's comment that he's "not a real Indian" after learning his family hasn't been in India for generations and does not speak Hindi is not entirely untrue. The identity and culture that Rajiv so passionately seeks to align with is not of the mainland that his professor seems to lay claim to. Though they share the Bhojpuri language, the respective historical contexts attached to the Bhojpuri his professor is familiar with versus the one Rajiv and his grandmother are familiar with have clearly shaped their selfhoods and lived experiences in distinct ways. With the spectacular hindsight of submitting this discussion post late, I now know Rajiv eventually departed from this pursuit of a somewhat nationalist Indian identity, instead exploring a more diasporic one.

to explore further: every derivation of language synonymous with another layer of melancholia

As the population of Muslim lascars grew in number and permanence in Cardiff, so did the marital unions between local low-income Welsh women and mostly Yemeni lascars (Despite this mention of class, it is unclear if marrying lascars elevated/changed their economic status in any relative way). These women often converted to Islam, in the process gaining a close-knit community that easily extended resources and support as needed. (At the same time, we are not given much of a picture of what the white Welsh community network looked like). For example, al-Hakimi noted the phenomena of female converts and established female focus groups to strengthen their understanding and belief in Islam, but this was also with the ulterior motive of making sure they had the tools to raise their “half-caste” children well-versed and faithful. To the greater Muslim community, the demonstrated faith of these women was inseparable from their responsibilities as women. The same sense of closeness that provided a network of support also meant greater scrutiny of the Welsh women’s adherence to Islam, namely their performance of Muslim womanhood. Gilliat-Ray notes that these wives' behaviors, like their conduct with men or the discipline of their children, were especially surveilled during periods when their husbands were away working at sea.

Outside of the Muslim community, the negative views of mixed-race relations isolated converts from the rest of white society, including estrangement from their own families who likely opposed the miscegenation. So while they gained one variably sympathetic Muslim community, they lost one prejudiced but privileged white community. This also fed into the proprietary, white supremacist fear of white women being ravaged/violated by men of color. I just watched the 1922 Nosferatu last night and was stunned to see that Nosferatu/Count Orlok is made to resemble a Semitic/Muslim caricature, depicted as turbaned and seafaring on his way to the Western country to feed on the blood of a “fair maiden.” Based on the 1897 classic Dracula, these narrative choices reveal that fear of takeover by a racial other and tainted racial purity made up a decent portion of white European concerns.

The Western empires accommodated African Muslims if they were deemed useful in furthering their economic interests, specifically expanding trade. At the same time, enslaved African Muslims disowned the black identity assigned to them (de-negrofication) in favor of the more lofty Muslim identity within which they found greater dignity and status: "African Muslims also displayed a certain sense of superiority. Most of the documented African Muslims in antebellum America, in fact, derived from noble and literate backgrounds, levels of cultivation that attracted the attention of white Americans" (GhaneaBassiri 22). Like J.J. Singh a century later, African Muslims utilized their socioeconomic standing to argue/assert their humanity. I'm sure they realized the value capital held in American society plus the respect that came with it and lay some fabricated claim to it. After all, not all of the enslaved African Muslims in antebellum America could have descended from noble lineage, at the same time that there exists bias in what ultimately gets recorded.

Besides capital, African Muslims also used religion to manipulate colonialists as we see with Abdul Rahman's faked appeal to Christianity: "Abdul Rahman’s purported conversion to Christianity and his promise to help its propagation in Africa was most likely a ploy to boost support for the manumission of his children, for once he was back in Africa, it was reported that ‘Abdul Rahman “died in the faith of his fathers – a Mahometan" (GhaneaBassiri 28).

Reading Friar Juan de Sotomayor accusations leveled against Catalina de Ibiza and her family made me wonder to what extent Inquisition-era Islamaphobia was exploited for personal reasons beyond religious faith. The fact that Maria Ruiz, the other most expounded upon account in Cook's reading, was also a woman furthered my suspicions about the possibility of gender-based discipline disguised as religious Inquisition. Cook suggests that Ruiz's confession could have been motivated by some element of anxiety or paranoia regarding her faith but my immediate thought was that she was being blackmailed by some member of her community as a form of punishment or revenge for a different offense related to a breach of womanly expectations. Historically, faith-based persecution of women is employed as retribution for sexual promiscuity or shirking conventional gendered performance. Part of Sotomayor's evidence that Catalina's family are Morisco non-believers is that she and her children were rowdy and disruptive during church. While this is an instance of Moriscos/Muslims being orientalized and barbarized, the allegation also makes clear that Catalina is being punished for her inability to properly perform the prescribed roles of motherhood and womanhood.

For Meena, her desires and rebellious behaviour are not in pursuit of happiness but escape from familial expectations of being good, polite, amenable, obedient, which in turn derive from colonial legacies and assimilatory survival. Ahmed argues that Meena’s rejection of her family’s expectations is a move towards Englishness but in fact she is moving away from the imperialist ideal of civility imposed on and perpetuated by her family. The fact that her adult relatives all become more racuous, lively, and relaxed upon her grandmother Nanima’s arrival, a figure symbolic of their heritage, suggests that they normally repress these behaviours when less proximal to Indianness/more proximal to whiteness. Nanima brings (out) stories of Meena’s family history and home country, a country “bursting with excitement, drama and passion, history in the making” (Ysal 210-11). To me, Meena’s attachment to Anita is less so about aspiring to whiteness but rather the recognition of a fellow “mad bad girl” who is unwilling to accept/conform. This identification is demonstrated when she finds interest in her Indian background after learning that it is also riddled with misbehaviour and excitement. Perhaps this alternate image of liveliness and mess borders on yet another typified expectation, but for Meena it is liberatory. She (and her family) is entitled to the full range of feeling and behaviour without scrutiny.

Islamophobia can be understood as a form of racism as a pattern of othering based on similar physical and cultural presentations emerges; physical and cultural presentations that, post-9/11, have practically been reduced to the concept of "brownness" or "darkness" that Rana mentioned existed even during the time of the Spanish Catholic empire. Western Christian empires manufactured this othering to justify the dominion and exploitation of the "oriental" world, and it is a legacy that has yet to cease as Husain highlights in their review of Rana's Terrifying Muslims. Western empires (like the British and now the American) prop up violence and create instability in Arab and South Asian countries, forcing their citizens to seek opportunities in places that accept their labor but deny them belonging (or even the right to life) and thus forever condemning them to the status of "migrants" caught in the ebbs and flows of market demands. Heems captures this in "Soup Boys," connecting American militancy in the Middle East to anti-Muslim and anti-brown incidents in his neighborhood, as well as the commodities he can consume ("Nikes, Timeport Motorola, Toyota Corolla") thanks to the cumulative output/outcome/objective of this wide-reaching imperialism. "The racialised figure of the Muslim was created... [to construct] an enemy in vulnerable populations such as easily deportable and expendable transnational workers" (Husain 6). Their faith, or rather incorrect perceptions of their faith, may have originally been presented as the rationale behind this vilification but as with the "Arab Slayer," Islamophobia has come to transcend religion.

Kominas "4 White Guys" mocks various elements of white American culture. It's a jab at typical indie rock band culture with its attempt to recreate the Beatles' Abbey Road album cover (at a janky South Philly crosswalk) and reiteration of being "just four/for white guys." The tennis rackets in particular remind me of the preppy, white upper-class aesthetics of Vampire Weekend. The whole music video consists of the group oscillating between their white and non-white worlds though these two worlds are not really separable. They admire shisha pipes above shelves of American cleaning products, play the sitar and basketball superimposed, and learn yoga from a white man on TV. They try on all these costumes of whiteness, as well as brownness through the perspective of whiteness a la Fanon's triple gaze. But in the end, it is the white box carrying pizza (the assimilation that kills us all) and not baklava (the perceived threats to whiteness) that brings about death! Like Baldwin says to his nephew, submitting to the expectations set by the white world (living "for white guys") will only lead to defeat and destruction. Instead, we must love white guys enough to "force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it" (Baldwin 24)??? I don't know if I agree with that... Love is a strong word... but I guess Maher Khalil ended up sharing his baklava with the very people who suspected him of malevolence.

I also noticed the overlooking of South Asian women/women in general in Bald's discussions so far. A particular passage from the introduction of Bengali Harlem that I found noteworthy: "The most important neighborhood to their operation was New Orleans’ Tremé. Here, some of the Bengalis married and started families with African American women, who were part of recent black migrations into the city, or with Creole of Color women who had deep generational roots in Tremé. These local women of color became as important to the operations of the network as the women who remained in West Bengal villages; while Bengali women produced the embroidered goods that would be sold in the United States and tended to the homes, land, and families that the peddlers left behind for months or years at a time, women in New Orleans helped Indian men settle and establish themselves locally; they gave the peddler network stability and longevity" (Bald 8).

Maybe I am interpreting this incorrectly, but I read the passage as implying the Bengali businessmen had wives and families both at home in West Bengal and in the US. Though it positions the women/wives from both continents as crucial to the success of the business networks that were established, the mention of their contributed labor and experience is so brief and cursory. Were these wives and families aware of each other's existence? What were the social and economic dynamics of that sort of polygamous arrangement? Hopefully, I am misunderstood and the Bengali women left behind were more like mothers and sisters but even then... Like you say, under the orientalist gaze, brown women are reduced to servile "abject objects" without much voice.

And then of the South Asian women that did make it to America: "Fantastical images of “the Orient” saturated the Mardi Gras parades of this period, while “Eastern” fantasies thrived within the walls of the city’s brothels" (Bald 51). Say more!!!!

Sivanandan suggests the British government manipulated race relations as necessary to bolster economic productivity. At first, race-based hostility between the white working class and black migrant working class helped prevent the formation of a collective class consciousness capable of overthrowing the exploitative system in place. The government only began properly enforcing and institutionalizing the anti-discriminatory laws they had barely established earlier (more as performative suggestions than anything else) when the black population had grown large enough and mistreated enough to threaten a sufficiently disruptive revolt of their own. Their ensuing "integration" efforts were just a means to placate and dilute the growing radicalism and militancy that put their capital at risk.

The lobbyists highlighted in Bald's Introduction to Bengali Harlem likely recognized a similar logic in the American context, employing it on their own end as they persuaded their government. J. J. Singh and Mubarek Ali Khan understood that racial difference could be looked past in some regards if there was promise of net economic gain. Though useful for satisfying the demands of unskilled labor amidst peak industrialism, an East Indian/non-white immigrant working-class population in America was a liability with no white nationalist loyalty to blind them. Having accepted the "[degradation of] the struggle to overthrow the system to the struggle to be well off within it," Singh and Khan put forth the East Indian middle and upper class in their negotiation for some form of recognition (Sivanandan 358). Meanwhile, Choudry, champion of the working class, attempted to appeal to a more romantic all-American pathos that Sivanandan would find phony.