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I'd like to request to pass this discussion post because I did an optional post for the topic on Race and Class. Thank you!

I'd like to request to pass this discussion post because I attended the Saathis talk. Thank you!

“Cultural Blackness”, as Thangaraj uses it, broadly refers to the aesthetics and styles created by African Americans, which are accompanied by political meanings that often get lost in the process of appropriation and commodification. The main example he uses to illustrate this point is the iconification of Michael Jordan, who has been turned into a “cool” and harmless symbol of basketball that appeals to non-Black people. Thangaraj contrasts him with his former teammate Craig Hodges, who is politically outspoken and therefore less palatable (Thangaraj 377). Thangaraj observed the use of cultural Blackness among the Indo-Pak basketball members he studied, who used African American slang, clothing, and gesticulations to create and express a sense of masculinity and “coolness” (378).

While cultural Blackness provided an alternative way for these South Asian men to achieve a degree of “American-ness”, they nonetheless positioned themselves above Black people. They sought to distance themselves from Black masculinity where it was characterized as too aggressive, seeing themselves as more “tame” and acceptable players. Thangaraj mentions Mustafa’s use of the word “Kallu” to refer to two players with darker skin and tightly coiled hair. Perceiving them to be bi-racial, Mustafa used this derogatory language to separate those players from South Asian American-ness (384). Su'ad Abdul Khabeer articulates a similar idea in her book Muslim Cool. She explains that Blackness – particularly Black music – attracts non-Black Muslims of colour who find solace in these communities in otherwise white-dominant societies, but will simultaneously take pains to distance themselves from Black people. For instance, Arab and South Asian Muslim communities tend to view Black Muslims as less religious because of the prevalent stereotypes of Black people as being aggressive and hyper-sexual, while second-generation middle-class Arab and South Asians participate in Black Muslim spaces and hip-hop scenes.

Similar ideas are at work in Roach Killa’s music video for “Ghora”, where he imitates the styles popularized by African American rap and hip-hop artists with his clothes and gesticulations. He also boasts an aggressive and hyper-masculine attitude in his lyrics, using slurs he probably should not be using. However, Blitzkrieg’s verse affirms that he does not “shoot guns” and these lyrics are only metaphors. The only bullets he shoots are his rhymes. This is an example of cultural Blackness being appropriated for its aesthetics while its political meanings and associations are not carried over in the final product. Roach Killa’s English verse also oscillates between different kinds of Black vernaculars, sounding like a vague combination of patois and AAVE. As Thangaraj argues, the consumption of Black masculinity tends to obfuscate the heterogeneity of cultural Blackness (377), which appears to be the case with this song.

I'd like to request to pass this discussion post because I attended the Australianama conference. Thank you! And sorry for using so many of these in a row

I'd like to request to pass this discussion post because I attended Arun Kundnani's talk. Thank you!

I'd like to request to pass this discussion post because I attended the SASSA mixer. Thank you!

I would like to request a pass on this discussion post because I attended Malhotra's talk. Thank you!

I would like to request a pass on this discussion post because I attended Jasmine Zine's talk.

Fun^da^mental’s music video for their song ‘Dog-Tribe’ was controversial for its alleged promotion of “political extremism”. Images of people sporting keffiyehs and Islamic symbols setting a bonfire seemed to scare white audiences. It was banned by major music platforms like MTV and was quickly condemned by magazines like Melody Maker (Hutnyck 58). Not only are these reactions indicative of the anxieties surrounding terrorism – particularly following the Gulf War and mirroring ongoing Western imperialism (59) – but they ignore the context in which Fun^da^mental wrote this song.

As we discussed in previous weeks about “seeing through whiteness”, white people often blindly uphold racist systems because of their distance from its consequences. This includes racial violence experienced by communities of colour, either through vigilantes like the skinheads depicted in the ‘Dog-Tribe’ music video or directly from the state itself. As such, the violence that racialized people experience tends to go ignored, while any reactions to it are over-emphasized as “violence”. For instance, the aggressive policing of black communities is often merely seen as “protocol”, but situations like the Watts Uprising are reduced to being “violent riots” when recorded in history. What is and is not considered “violence” seems to rely on the perpetrator. As Kundnani points out, the violence within Muslim communities is also prone to disproportionate media attention. “Honour killings” and domestic abuse faced by Muslim women are frequently used to justify attacking entire cultures on the basis that this violence is inherent and must be driven out of Western liberal democracies. Domestic abuse perpetrated by white men, however, is not seen as a national threat (Kundnani 138). Fun^da^mental seeks to address these double standards in ‘Dog-Tribe’ through lyrics like the following:

“People wonder why I’m positioned by the window / Ammunition close at hand though / Looking like the man brother Malcolm / If I can’t reason, time for some action … Don’t ask for violence, just self-defence”

Fun^da^mental likens their call to action by alluding to Malcolm X’s infamous call for black Americans to defend themselves “by any means necessary”. Methods that function within white institutions often do not work, which they demonstrate in the music video with a scene of a politician dismissing a brown man’s petitioning. The apparatuses borne out of white supremacy are not designed to address the concerns of racialized people – when reasoning cannot work, they argue that the oppressed need to “take action”. Asian Dub Foundation’s song ‘TH9’ presents a similar stance, arguing that “fascists” (a definition encompassing the state) do not listen to them, so they must resort to violence because it is the “only language [they] understand” – both because fascists employ violence themselves, but also because direct action is the clearest way for the oppressed to demonstrate how they feel when they otherwise go ignored.

So, while songs like 'Dog-Tribe' and 'TH9' seem extreme in their messages, it is worth questioning what factors might drive them to feel this way and whether those factors cannot be considered just as, if not more, extreme or violent. As Hutnyck argues, violence from the police, state, and law are frequently underemphasized compared to the reactions of the victims (77). I will say that, as someone who was recently physically assaulted by the police and has been feeling rather angry because of it, I do not blame Fun^da^mental and ADF for their calls to action. Racial violence is immediate – not everyone can be perfect Gandhis when dealing with it.

Debates over what constitutes “authentic” Indian food can sometimes veer into elitism. As Brian Spooner argues, authenticity is a concept that is “determined by the choices and desires of persons seeking to establish, or strengthen, an elevated social position” (Buettner 156). Indian restaurants emerging after the 1980s in Britain claiming authenticity were doing so to contest the many “inauthentic” and “cheap” restaurants made popular in the preceding decades by working-class South Asian migrants, who created and served foods like chicken tikka masala. Attached to the notion of “authentic Indian cuisine” came attempts from elite Indian restaurant owners to separate themselves from working-class Bangladeshis and Pakistanis in particular, as well as Muslims (169). Attempts to achieve culinary “authenticity” also tend to be rooted in nostalgia for an imaginary and unchanging homeland (Mannur 28). Like what Madhur Jaffrey promotes in her cookbook, the value of an Indian dish is often determined by how closely the cook replicates a “traditional” recipe, with deviations making it fraudulent or diluted in quality (30).

This has implications for how fusion foods and foods created by Indian diasporas are perceived by both Indians and non-Indians. Being Indo-Caribbean, my cultural foods are default “fusion foods”. Whether a result of my mixed heritage or just the social intermingling of different peoples in Guyana, I grew up eating curry as much as I did eating West African cook-up, Chinese fried rice, and other dishes that do not have names but are reminiscent of all three origins. Long being considered the “bastard child of the nation”, diasporas are often measured in relation to the “homeland” and are defined by their inability to perfectly replicate their cultural modes (Mannur 42). Shani Mootoo articulates this dissonance between Indo-Caribbeans and India in her book “Out on Main Street”. Mannur provides an excerpt where the narrator is demeaned by a clerk for her inability to give the “real” names of the Indian sweets she wants to order, using instead the terms she knows from Trinidad (43). By asserting herself and her language, “she refuses to publicly affirm an exclusionary, chauvinistic version of citizenship that devalorizes and delegitimizes her experiences” as a diasporic Indo-Caribbean (44).

Though foods like chicken tikka masala is arguably a product of assimilation–arguments that I do agree with in many ways–I also see it as a testament to the strength of diasporas. Is it not admirable that despite their cuisine being seen as malodorous and unhygienic (Buettner 150-151), these migrants nevertheless found a market? As Buettner argues, Asians in Western restaurant sectors are not just passive actors being absorbed by a larger British cultural force. Trying to establish themselves “among a white population that was initially skeptical, if not outright hostile” to their presence required clever business strategies that would allow them to manoeuvre these unwelcoming spaces (147). Like Bengali migrants in the United States who capitalized off Orientalist stereotypes to peddle their wares, these South Asian restaurateurs were doing what they could to survive in the colonial capital. To say that foods like chicken tikka masala are merely tragedies in the history of South Asian cuisine, in my opinion, erases the efforts of the working-class migrants of the mid to late twentieth century.

Like chicken tikka masala, my mother’s curry would fail to be considered “authentic Indian food” by many standards and could easily be dismissed as another byproduct of colonialism pulling diasporic Indians away from their "real" cuisine. But I do not think so-called authenticity denotes quality. I see her curry as the result of a rich and unique history that survived across oceans, with new spices and flavours added along the way to reflect its changing environments. And it just tastes good. Is that not enough?

This is a great post, Maimuna. It is interesting to see how South Asians were able to find such an animated market for their goods in a country that simultaneously created so many legal barriers for them. In addition to your mention of the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, there was also the Alien Contract Labor Law of the 1890s to the 1910s. An extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act, this law prevented foreign labourers from entering the country, which affected Bengali peddlers more than others (Bald 41). While they sold their wares, the threat of deportation hung over their heads, no matter how much the New Orleans economy depended on them (28). To quote Bald, “These men came to the United States on a thin edge between Indophilia and xenophobia” (46).

As you already described, displaying “oriental” objects in the home symbolized a higher class status for white Americans. Though my art history knowledge is rusty, this reminds me of a trend in some sixteenth and seventeenth-century European portraits, in which the European subject donned “oriental” garb to show that they were well-travelled or wealthy. Dutch Golden Age artists like Rembrandt (see Man in Oriental Costume, for example) featured exotic clothing in portraits and tronies to symbolize the nation’s wealth and the goods they were beginning to obtain from their flourishing trade routes. Cabinets of Curiosities were also popular throughout Europe during this period, which were filled with items obtained from places around Asia, the South Pacific, and the Americas. They represented the high and well-travelled status of the people that owned them, and were open for the public to admire. I find it interesting how the allure attached to these exotic visual signifiers continued to drive white Europeans and Americans to possess them across centuries.

Ironically, though “oriental” decorum represented wealth for white Americans, the people from whom those aesthetics originated did not enjoy much mobility themselves. As Bald shows in chapter five, even those that were able to upgrade from working as line cooks or street food vendors into having their own restaurants “were still living normal lives”, and that “even a ‘successful’ restaurant like the Kashmir did not make Nawab Ali a wealthy man” (Bald 180). Aside from exceptions like Ibrahim Choudry, most South Asian Muslims in New York did not have a public profile or ascend their working-class status (188). This contrasts with the white Americans whose fame was aided by their appropriation of “oriental” aesthetics, like Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and William Walker Atkinson (16).

Criminal cases like the ones presented by Nayan Shah in “Adjudicating Intimacies on U.S. Frontiers” tend to be more present in historical records than cases of consensual gayness and nonmonogamy. Specifically regarding Gate and Mesilla, one reason for this may be because they affirmed the widespread negative perspectives on South Asian migrants in Canada and the United States during the early twentieth century. Jawala Singh/Julio Jubala and the Sing brothers appear as sexual transgressors, perpetuating the anxieties held by white Americans over the corruption of monogamous heterosexual marriages that characterized the “moral purity” of a Protestant America (Shah 134). Stories like these are the ones that get publicized, printed in high numbers, and preserved through sensationalism. It is unsurprising, then, that attractive headlines like “Hindu Weds White Girl by Stealing Away to Arizona” from 1918 were written in the first place (Leonard 63).

Shah demonstrates how Soledad’s attorneys used such negative depictions of South Asians to their advantage. The preadolescent ages of Nami and Jawala Singh at the time of marriage, the arrangement, and the timing of sexual consummation were argued to make the marriage illegitimate. Because these qualities opposed American Protestant and liberal values, Nami was not considered his “real” wife and legitimate inheritor (Shah 121). To white audiences, Singh/Jubala’s two wives represent the dual loyalties that Asian immigrants were feared to have. South Asians were seen as incapable of becoming part of the nation because of a refusal to let go of the values of their home countries. As an editor in the Vancouver News-Advertiser wrote: “It is impossible to make Canadians out of immigrants whose customs, traditions and habits forms an insurmountable barrier between them and the Canadianization” (Ward 90). Nami's existence in this trial only proved that South Asian migrants would always have ties to their homeland that would prevent them from conforming to Western sexual and family mores.

South Asians were also seen as invading the workplace by the white working class or “flooding the province with cheap Asiatic labour” (Ward 83). Despite Verma’s success in getting Don Sing acquitted by approximating him to the ideal American Protestant husband, the other two Sings were still convicted. Fears of sodomy and rape in the workplace were solidified by this story, in which the Sings not only sexually penetrated a white man they worked with, but nonconsensually penetrated the workplace with their presence. This case only confirmed fears that South Asian men brought sexually violent behaviours with them overseas that threatened white workers on the most personal level.

Rajiv’s melancholia comes primarily from his disconnect with Bhojpuri, Hindi and Hinduism. This contrasts with–and partially results from–his father’s aggressive rejection of their heritage. Rajiv wanted to learn the language of his Aji, sing her songs, and listen to her talk about the Ramayana so that he could “learn the deep ocean of stories of where [he] came from” (Mohabir 19). His father, however, went by an English name, practised Christianity, and expressed anger when his family showed an interest in their Indian heritage. He even went so far as to destroy his wife’s only physical connection to her family (21).

As cruel as this behaviour is for the family around him, Rajiv acknowledges that this was a survival strategy his father had to adopt in a colonial context. One way he does this is by Anglifying his speech when talking to white people, using “potato” instead of “aloo”, for instance (20). In thinking about it, I realized that my father would often do the same. His Guyanese Creole became nearly non-existent in public, but when he was around his siblings and extended family, it would come out in full. Masking and code-switching are common mechanisms that racialized people use to cope with environments that ostracize or punish them for diverging from the white standard. Ironically, the grandchildren of the white people who shamed our grandparents for their language have turned it into their college major (Mohabir 38).

As Rajiv’s story makes clear, his melancholia begins with his physical separation from India and Guyana. After reading about Lallie’s story in Khatun’s chapter in Australianama, however, I wondered if Ahmed’s concept of melancholia could also apply to indigenous peoples as much as it could to migrants and their descendants. Being displaced from the homeland is one thing, but what happens when someone is displaced within the homeland?

Khatun explains that, with the Aborigines Act of 1905, children under sixteen who were born to an Aboriginal mother and a non-Aboriginal father (called “half-castes”) were legally under the parentage of the state (158). Being a “half-caste”, Lallie was under police surveillance and was later imprisoned in an institution. After multiple escape attempts, she was restricted by law from entering Western Australia again. With this, she was cut off from her mother, the desert she was raised in, and the stories of the Tjukurpa that she was only beginning to learn. Where Rajiv had to traverse a language barrier to connect with his Aji, Lallie had to traverse a legal one to connect with her mother, which she attempted to do until her mother died (160). Though Lallie’s inner thoughts are not expressed like Rajiv’s in this reading, I can imagine that people like her–whose connection to their land and culture has been denied to them–can yearn for their roots as much as a migrant can. In the same ways that unassimilable migrants are seen as incompatible or even threats to Western societies, indigenous melancholy compromises the foundations of a “White Australia”.

Indian labourers in Britain between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were seen somewhere between being human and “chattel”, not always quite fitting into either category. On one hand, they were often dehumanized. Seddon mentions that Muslim Indian lascars were treated so brutally on ships that they would attempt to escape. In the 1850s, they would be crammed in lodging houses without bedding, chairs or tables. Some would die from hunger and the cold (Seddon 61) or even from being beaten by their white captain (75). Such severe mistreatment attests to how worthless these lascars were perceived to be.

Indians were also sometimes likened to animals, with engine stokers being called “donkey-men” (63), for instance. There was a lascar who, according to Joseph Salter’s record, was called “Monkey Abraham” who apparently assumed an “ape-like attitude” and wore “ridiculous ornaments” (81). Seddon describes him as using his ‘exoticness’ as a last resort to make money, but the language that Salter uses and the fact that this was an established image Abraham could exploit says enough. Visram also describes how a Bengali boy named Nabob was called a “little pet boy” by William Hickey (Visram 12). While he was not working for him as a servant, Hickey still clearly did not see him as an equal. I happened to do a small project last year where I looked at advertisements for runaway South Asian servants, and I would add that the concept of there being rewards for them was rather dehumanizing, as their existence was being given an exact value.

Despite this inhumane treatment, I would argue that Indian labourers were still not seen or treated entirely as “chattel”, as Visram refers to them in the title of her chapter. She explains that many labourers were abandoned after they were no longer needed, resigned to begging on the streets of London for money. Though this was a terrible fate, the fact itself shows that they were not legally property. Unlike enslaved individuals, their lives were not owned and their contracts had an eventual end. Some accounts of white Britons even express sympathy for their situation, as one did in the Public Advertiser in 1786 by calling for them to be taken back to India as an “act of humanity” (Visram 19). Sometimes, notions of dehumanization and sympathy were expressed at the same time. In 1789, Mrs. Lock describes the Indian servants she encountered as having “inhuman voices and barbarous chattering”, yet she felt sorry that they were “taken away from their own country” (12). The situation of Indian labourers in Britain during this period was arduous, but not to the extent that legal human “chattel” was.

(Just as a side note, if anyone is interested in looking at advertisements for African and South Asian runaways, I suggest this database, which has a pretty accessible and easy to navigate collection!)

Why is an exclusive focus on biography misleading, and what other forms of history-writing need to supplement it?

As GhaneaBassiri explains, focusing exclusively on biographies can only provide a small part of a very complex picture. For one, these biographies cannot be generalized. Scholars estimate that tens of thousands of African Muslims lived in colonial and Antebellum America. The few biographies that exist can only allow us to get a glimpse into what life was like for some people, not the average person. It is also important to consider whose stories survive as much as whose stories do not. These biographies are of Muslims who, “as a result of a combination of serendipity and their own extraordinary backgrounds, were sufficiently prominent to be memorialized in white America” (GhaneaBassiri 16). For example, Omar Ibn Said remains an exceptional case because of his ability to read and write, even if–to his own description–he is not proficient (Said 9). He describes himself as being taken in by the Owens, who were a “good” family that provided for him and did not make him do hard labour (Said 12). One could imagine that not all enslaved people were "owned" by white people as forgiving or shared the educational background he had from Futa Toro. His experiences, as well as his feelings, writing style, and perspectives, cannot be applied to other enslaved African Muslims without a significant number of other biographies to compare it to.

GhaneaBassiri suggests that it is beneficial to supplement these biographies with other sources. Sources that identify enslaved people by name or nationality, like runaway advertisements and ledgers from the United States, combined with sources from the places in Africa where enslaved people were taken, can help build larger contexts. For instance, Michael Gomez’s historical work shows that the wars in West Africa between Muslim reformers and the non-Muslims who fought back explain some patterns of who was sold into slavery from these regions. Between the 1760s and the 1780s, Kundi Burama of Wassaulu invaded the community of the Muslim faithful. According to Gomez, most African Muslims taken to the United States around this time and the early nineteenth century ended up there because of these wars (GhaneaBassiri 18).

These are great questions, Grace! Regarding your question as to why there would be a point in having people “convert” if they do not practise privately or believe it in their hearts, I have some speculations as a history major who has learned a little bit about Inquisitorial approaches to religious deviancy. These institutions functioned as much for social control as they did for (supposedly) ensuring the salvation of the souls they governed. Whether the pendulum swung one way or the other depended on the personal motivations of the many individuals that comprised these institutions, and that is unfortunately difficult to tell without something like preserved diaries from all of them.

As far as the effects go, Inquisitions functioned–regardless of the motivations of the inquisitors–as a deterrent. Prosecuting, torturing, imprisoning and sometimes executing people for having unorthodox beliefs sends a message to the population to at least pretend to be Catholic, or else they might get reported. It is useful to compare the perception of Moriscos with the perception of the indigenous peoples in “New Spain”. Whether a Morisco was secretly Muslim may not have mattered because their souls were a lost cause anyway; what mattered were the souls of the indigenous peoples, who were vulnerable to “corruption” by Muslim ideas. For example, Friar Sotomayor was concerned about this, so he filed complaints against the Morisca Catalina de Ibiza and her children for being so disruptive of Mass (Cook 90). If the Inquisition could scare Muslims into thinking that their neighbours could report on them (which they very much did, like in the case of Pedro Hernández (Cook 96)), they would keep their ideas to themselves and thus stop them from propagating. The Inquisition and the colony as a whole stand to lose power if they cannot maintain at least the impression of spiritual orthodoxy, considering that a major justification for the colonial project hinged on the Christian belief that these lands were given to Europeans by God and it is their mission to “save" the "primitive” indigenous populations.

Sorry for this long response; I hope it may be of some use. Of course, this is only one approach to some of your questions, so please feel free to add to it or contest it if you or anyone else would like to!

Moriscos were Muslims from the Iberian peninsula who were forcibly converted to Christianity during the Reconquista. The term also applied to their descendants. While some continued to identify themselves as Muslim and practiced Islam after forced conversion, others indeed could have identified as Catholic. Some even practised aspects of both religions and did not necessarily adhere to one or the other. Islam itself was practised in a variety of ways that might even seem strange or antithetical, such as the arguments made by some Morisco authors that Mary was not a virgin, despite the Quran praising her for this quality, according to Cook (84). Nevertheless, “Morisco” was a term applied regardless of a person’s individual faith and status variances. It instead denoted a certain lineage “tainted” by Muslim blood.

As Cook explains, free Morisco emigrants sought refuge in Spain’s new Atlantic colonies in hopes of escaping suspicions of being “crypto-Muslims”, or Muslims that continued to practice their faith after being converted to Catholicism. In Spain, they were suspected of being loyal to the Ottoman Empire, but those who emigrated were also constructed as threats to the integrity of Spanish colonies. Inherent to the encomienda system–which upheld these colonies–was also a religious mission that aimed to Christianize and “civilize” the indigenous peoples that were forced into doing hard labour on them. This is why encomenderos like Diego Romero had to emphasize his devotion to Catholicism in petitions to the Spanish Crown as a Morisco (Cook 80). Officials like the friar Juan de Sotomayor was concerned with Catalina de Ibiza and her children disrupting Mass and throwing indigenous peoples off their path to a pure Catholic conversion (Cook 90).

Like we previously touched on in discussions before, the Muslim figure is seen as suspect in contemporary Western societies. In the way that Moriscos were seen as spreading heretical ideas to the indigenous populations and thus compromising the success of Spanish colonies, Muslim immigrants are perceived to carry backward values that threaten liberal democracies. Latine Muslims are no doubt included in this group, regardless of whether they crossed the border or if, as Morales says, “the border crossed over them” (Morales 65). He cites a Latino Muslim in saying that, after 9/11, someone yelled “Osama bin Laden” at him, which he speculates might have been because of his beard (Morales 71). In the way that Moriscos were identified by their clothes and customs, the Muslim’s position in society could be determined by their outward or public display of religiosity or perceived religiosity.

In movies like Bend It Like Beckham and East is East, melancholia exists as an impediment to the nation. Specifically, I would like to explore how characters who fail to let go of “lost” objects also fail to contribute to the nation economically. George Khan’s refusal to let go of Islam in East is East turns him into a violent patriarch who abuses his assimilated children for failing to hold onto the same object. The audience recognizes that Islam is already lost, and his refusal to acknowledge it only drives him further into his own melancholy. Mr. Bhamra, by contrast, can ascend his melancholic status by admitting that racism (to the logic of this movie) is a personal hangup that he needs to let go of. In doing so, his daughter is freed from becoming melancholic herself and can integrate into English society by playing football.

One way these two characters differ is in their contribution to England’s economy. Mr. Bhamra is seen wearing his work uniform on multiple occasions, including in his first and last scenes. Without saying anything, the audience is made aware that he is a working citizen. Conversely, Mr. Khan does not seem to be much of a worker at all. In an argument with his English wife (at the 19:45 mark), it is made clear that while he owns the shop that brings their income, it is his wife who runs it, not him. Where the redeemable immigrant economically contributes to the nation, the irredeemable immigrant is portrayed as freeloading off his English wife’s labour.

The only other character we see in a work uniform in Bend It Like Beckham is Pinky, though she does not work as much as she tries to make it seem. In one scene (at 27:33), Pinky is making out with her soon-to-be husband in a car parked outside of an airport. Her flight attendant’s uniform is partially removed, and Indian music plays over the radio. Though this secret liaison is a transgression of her family’s expectations, it nevertheless confirms her ultimate desire: to have a traditional Indian marriage to this man. This is a desire that, as Ahmed explains, is ridiculed by the narrative when compared to Jess’s desires (Ahmed 136). This is represented metaphorically when, in the same scene, a plane zooms by the car. If Jess is like an airplane symbolizing happiness by going “up and away” to freedom (Ahmed 137), then Pinky is the parked car limited by her traditional wants. Added to this is the fact that she indulges in these desires while she is supposed to be working at that same airport. Again, the character whose source of happiness is rooted in their home country's traditions fails to contribute much to their host country's economy.

Pinky and Mr. Khan embody what Mill sees as wrong in the native. To him, they “experience pleasure from the wrong things in the wrong way” and are “in need of redirection” (Ahmed 126). As long as their sources of happiness are linked to the “lost” object that is their home country’s culture, then they impede the nation. Jess and Mr. Bhamra, by contrast, are redeemable contributors (by working as a security officer (?) and playing professional football, respectively) because their sources of happiness are derived from playing sports in an integrated English context. Though I am not certain that these were conscious choices made by the writers of these films, this was just how I interpreted these details within the context of Ahmed’s concept of “melancholic migrants”.

In the first chapter of Terrifying Muslims, Rana explains that “‘Hindu’ was a catchall term in late-nineteenth-century America for those from the Indian subcontinent”, applied regardless of religious orientation or lack thereof (Rana 42). Though Arabs were sometimes understood as a distinct group (racialized as “Syrians” coming from the late Ottoman empire), both Arabs and South Asians were also categorized as “Mohammedans”. This historical conflation between these brown Asian ethnic and religious groups continues in the twentieth century. For instance, Balbir Singh Sodhi was murdered shortly following 9/11 because he was mistaken as a Muslim Arab. Despite being Sikh, his visual appearance made him the target of anti-Muslim racism. Husain brings up similar attacks that happened to three South Asian immigrants by a man who called himself the “Arab Slayer” (Husain 1). As Rana explains, the racialization of Islam through social identification occurs “via a combination of identifiers, such as dress, behaviour, and phenotypic expression” (Rana 27). The lived realities of non-Muslims perceived as Muslims demonstrate, in one way, how anti-Muslim thought and action can be understood as a form of racism rather than religious discrimination alone.

Heems conveys a similar idea in Soup Boys. In separate verses, he says that “they’re throwing stones at the Mosque”, and later that “they’re throwing stones at [his] parent’s house” as well as at “the temple”. The people throwing stones (literally and metaphorically) care little about the difference between Hindus and Muslims. This is reinforced by the clip shown at the beginning of the interview, in which Obama is asked if he decides who is targeted by armed drones used to combat terrorists. He dodges the question by saying that he prioritizes American lives. These drones, just like the stones thrown, end up hitting a wide array of people that extend beyond their intended target.

I also find it interesting that Heem chooses to call the Hindu place of worship a “temple” rather than a mandir. I have often heard people refer to gurdwaras, mandirs, and sometimes mosques interchangeably as “temples”. This word choice adds to the homogenization of these religions and peoples that Heems points out in this song. He is, then, “in touch with these goons getting stoned at the mosque”, considering that he too is a goon getting stoned at the “temple”. He relates his experiences of racism to that of Muslims, using the term “stoned” as a double entendre for also getting high, something he seems to do to cope with the violence his community experiences both at home and abroad.

Thank you for your comment, Safiya. I think you make a great connection with Muñoz's idea of disidentification. Your point that "their culture and identity is solidified through the existence of the Other ..." reminds me very much of what Said was saying in Orientalism as well.