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NATIONAL ACTIVISM IN TRANSNATIONAL TIMES: A STUDY OF POST-9/11 SOUTH ASIAN AND SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN WORKS

DHANASHREE THORAT

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2013

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to my committee chair, Dr. Malini Schueller, for her help and support in completing this project. She has encouraged me to strive for excellence in the scholarship I produce. I would also like to thank my other committee members, Dr.

Anita Anantharam, and Dr. Amy Ongiri, for their advice and feedback as I worked on this project.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 3

ABSTRACT ...... 5

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 7

Othering of Muslims in Post-9/11 America ...... 7 Critique and Defense of Nationalism ...... 15 Re-Imagining the Nation-State ...... 22

2 LOCATING SITES OF RESISTANCE IN MOHSIN HAMID’S THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST AND WAJAHAT ALI’S THE DOMESTIC CRUSADERS ...... 37

Economic Fundamentalism and Popular Nationalism in The Reluctant Fundamentalist ...... 38 Familiar Conflict and the Nation-State in The Domestic Crusaders ...... 52

3 THE ACTIVIST AND THE TERRORIST: REIMAGINING THE NATION-STATE IN MY NAME IS KHAN AND NEW YORK ...... 64

The Origin of the Terrorist Citizen after 9/11 ...... 70 Claiming the Nation ...... 75

WORKS CITED ...... 90

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 95

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

NATIONAL ACTIVISM IN TRANSNATIONAL TIMES: A STUDY OF POST-9/11 SOUTH ASIAN AND SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN WORKS

Dhanashree Thorat

August 2013

Chair: Malini Johar Schueller Major: English

The revitalized Orientalist discourse in a post-9/11 America has cast Muslims as threats to the American society and nation-state, spawned a domestic legacy of Muslim

Othering, and buttressed a jingoistic nationalism. This project examines the American state’s Othering of South Asian Muslims, and those South Asian subjects interpellated as Muslims, as well as the response articulated to this Othering by South Asian Muslims in the context of the following four works: My Name is Khan (Bollywood film), New York

(Bollywood film), The Domestic Crusaders (a play by Wajahat Ali), and The Reluctant

Fundamentalist (a novel by Mohsin Hamid).

I argue that these works not only challenge the hegemonic representational schema which has defined Muslims in the U.S., but more importantly, all four works present the nation-state as a viable site of citizenship, belonging, and resistance for minority subjects. The nation-state is posited as a protective site which can support minority rights de-privileged in the processes of globalization. Thus, subjects turn to a minority and popular nationalism to reinscribe their claims to the nation-state. This nationalistic move is accompanied by practices which hybridize the nation, and subjects

attempt this hybridizing through acts of civic, legal, and educational activism and radicalism to transform public space, institutional memory, and national culture.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Othering of Muslims in Post-9/11 America

The attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2011 revitalized an

Orientalist discourse in the United States, which enabled the Othering of Muslims living in the United States as threats to the society and security of the nation-state. This

Othering was supported by and visible in state policies in the years after 9/11 and sustained an atmosphere of suspicion about Muslims, American citizens or otherwise, and broadly speaking, of Islam. The dramatic rise in anti-Muslim hate crime, a spike of almost 1,600%, reported by the FBI in the three weeks after the attacks was an early indicator that popular anger about the attacks was being displaced to the racialized bodies of Muslims as well as Arabs, South Asians and others who were racially and religiously misrecognized (Confronting Discrimination in the Post-9/11 Era 4). This popular anger was construed as a form of patriotism to the American nation, and a demonstration of fealty to the nation by way of targeting a block of citizens, residents or visitors now considered un-American, or even anti-American. The production of Muslims as cultural Others occurred alongside the racialization of Muslims, and these projects produced subjects who could be framed by state policy and popular imagination but were simultaneously placed outside the realm of citizenship and rights.

State policies set the tenor for this cultural and racial Othering of Muslims after

9/11. Immediately after 9/11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation detained more than

1200 suspects, many deemed so because of their racial features. The Department of

Justice stopped reporting the number of detainees after it topped 1200. The first troubling hints of human rights violation came with this round of detentions. Many

detainees were held without charges for months, denied counsel (in contravention of international and American laws), and eventually many “were deported for minor immigration violations” rather than on terrorism related charges (Immigration Policy –

Targets of Suspicion 3). To counteract future terrorist attacks on American soil, the government soon implemented measures ranging from a new immigration policy to expanded judicial powers. 1Extensive research already exists on the state’s misuse of these new powers and policies, particularly via the 2USA PATRIOT Act, and NSEERS to track, interview, detain, and deport Muslim aliens in the United States suspected of terrorism. The various policy actions instituted under the PATRIOT Act constitute the domestic ‘war on terrorism,’ which finds its foreign counterpart in the jingoistic nationalism which led to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

These domestic measures affected a disproportionate number of Muslim aliens living in the U.S., but did not remove American citizens from their purview. The wide ranging scope of these policies, thus, not only affected immigrants, but also citizens and communities. For instance, the open ended language of the NSEERS left even immigration lawyers baffled about who needed to comply with the special registration and interviews mandated for individuals from countries with large Muslim populations.

Eventually, the government interviewed almost “100,000 people of Muslim, Arab, or

South Asian origin, including citizens, permanent residents, applicants for permanent residency, individuals legally present in the country on student or work visas, and

1 A Penn State Symposium observes, for instance, that the special interest detentions “raised numerous human rights concerns ranging from prolonged arbitrary detention to interference with the right to counsel to unduly harsh conditions of confinement.” ( 9-11 Effect Immigration 8).

2 The term stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism

people who overstayed their visas” (Targets of Suspicion 2). Most of the immigrants detained under these policies were not charged with terrorism, but some were eventually deported for visa or immigration violations. Without going into specifics, I do want to note that some of these abuses of state power, and the discriminatory nature of these measures has been recognized not only by human rights organizations and researchers, but also by the government and 3legal system. Furthermore, this public production of racialized subjects and stereotypes has a direct import on private violence

(like hate crime) against Muslims (Volpp 1582). Volpp argues that through the

Orientalist tropes engendered by the rhetoric of the ‘war on terrorism,’ and especially, the racial construction of the terrorist figure, “the American public is being instructed that looking “Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim” equals “potential terrorist.”” (Volpp 1582).

The impact of such measures and their consequences was dramatically felt in

Muslim communities. Community members were targeted by state actions, and alienated by local institutions such as school systems, residential councils, and city councils. These institutions are typically charged with producing normative cultural behaviors and given the construction of Muslims as cultural Others, their policing of

Muslim bodies is not unexpected. Land use has been a polarizing point in this discussion. The Department of Justice report, “Confronting Discrimination in the Post-

9/11 Era: Challenges and Opportunities Ten Years Later” notes that land use investigations under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) have disproportionately affected Muslims. Although Muslims “comprise approximately

1% of the American population, 14% of the [Civil Rights] Division’s RLUIPA land-use

3 The indefinite arbitrary detention policies violated international as well as American law. (9-11 Effect Immigration 9)

investigations in the statute’s first ten years involved mosques or Muslim schools” (11).

These investigations concerned, among other issues, whether zoning requests for mosques had been rejected due to a council’s anti-Muslim bias. The flashpoint in these land use debates was the proposed construction of Park 51, a Muslim Community

Center, close to the World Trade Center site. In 2010, the center drew national attention and was labeled anti-American by its detractors (Haberman). The furore against the center, and in general, the construction of mosques, stemmed partially from the misguided association of mosques as breeding grounds for Islamic fundamentalism, and points to the 4larger social typing of Muslims as terrorists. This short review of the post-9/11 policies and their impacts emphasizes that while 9/11 was a trauma for the

American people, its effect was doubly experienced by Muslims living in America who also found themselves targeted and alienated as Others. Maira attributes such racialized exclusions to an imperial logic which defines who can live within and belongs to the American empire (Maira 6). This imperial logic attempts to manage and control the empire’s subjects (not only citizens, but also those who live within its geographical borders and work within its capitalist structures) through domestic and foreign measures, Orientalist tropes, and racialized Othering.

Given these various considerations, my project takes as a point of departure that the nation-state’s interest in protecting human rights has been dependent on furthering its (imperial) ends. Such a critique of the nation-state state, and 5by extension,

4 A 2011 Pew study on Muslim Americans found that the general public holds a disproportionately higher belief that U.S. Muslims provide “at least a fair support for extremism,” and that 24% of the public “thinks that Muslim support for extremism is increasing” while 4% of Muslim Americans believe the same (1).

5 Benedict Anderson, in his seminal work on nation and nationalism, defines nation as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). Nationalism, which Anderson calls a “cultural artifact” enables the processes of imagining which call the nation into being (4).

nationalism lends itself to the persistent postcolonial studies critique of the nation-state as well as calls for its demise. My project intervenes at this point to examine, on the one hand, how the American state’s Othering of Muslims has been represented in subaltern fiction and popular culture (specifically, film), and the response articulated within these works to the Othering. The four works in this study, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (a novel by Mohsin Hamid), The Domestic Crusaders (a play by Wajahat Ali), My Name is

Khan (a Bollywood film), and New York (a Bollywood film), speak to the Othering and alienation of South Asian youth, some Muslims and others interpellated as Muslims by the state, who are coming of age in the post 9/11 milieu in America. The South Asian protagonists in these four works embrace various forms of dissent and activism to destabilize the imperial bureaucracy and ideology of the American empire. These forms include grassroots activism and violent radicalism and seek to make Muslim voices and concerns heard on a national stage, in essence challenging the hegemonic order which has defined a representational schema for Muslims in the United States and abroad.

These four works, however, do more than challenge a representational schema, which by itself is a limiting goal. While the means of hybridizing the nation might differ, all four works present the nation-state as a viable site of resistance, and subjects turn to nationalism to reinscribe their citizenship and belonging to a nation and recreate the nation from within its borders.

This claiming of the nation-state forms the crux around which my project is organized. Such a claiming combats the splintering of the subject from the discourse of

As Pheng Cheah observes, the concepts of nation and state should be considered separately, rather than automatically collapsed. The concepts become bounded when the nation and nationalism is annexed by the territorial state (Inhuman Conditions 20-21).

citizenship and belonging as a result of racialized Othering. Leti Volpp writes that

Othered subjects (Muslims, Middle Easterners, Arabs, or South Asians) are

“interpellated as antithetical to the citizen’s sense of identity… [and] the consolidation of

American identity takes place against them” (1594). Thus, a cultural Othering places the subjects outside the networks of kinship, solidarity, and belonging which constitute an imagined nation. Second, this cultural stripping of citizenship has ramifications on how the subject can enact political and legal citizenship (1594). In conclusion, Volpp notes that “those who appear “Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim” and who are formally citizens of the United States are now being thrust outside of the protective ambit of citizenship as identity” (1598). In the following two chapters, I argue that these four works articulate paths to national belonging by cultivating social consciousness given form by acts of activism and radicalism. These acts engage with hegemonic logic to dismantle it. These acts unfold when subjects have recognized their tenuous position in the imperial hierarchy, and this recognition occurs due to their Othering. Although Fanon develops this point in the context of anti-colonial resistance, his call for social and political consciousness to occur alongside or immediately after national consciousness is still relevant to this post-9/11 era (Fanon 203). In essence,6 by engaging socially and politically within the nation, minority subjects declare their refusal to accept the terms of their Othering, and instead transform public and institutional space and memory. By

6 I am not suggesting though, that South Asian Muslims, American citizens or otherwise, were not nationally and socially conscious before the attacks on the World Trade Center. On the one hand, such a characterization would be ill informed, and on the other, it would uphold post-9/11 social movements as reactionary. Moreover, such a misguided characterization would be in a compact with hegemonic sentiment which sees Muslims as not being sufficiently socially engaged, and of suspect national loyalty. The social acts which subjects in these works engage in are not shows of patriotism or national allegiance.

enacting social acts of activism or radicalism, minority subjects express solidarity with

Othered subjects and articulate a vision for reform.

These four works are also invested in a particular constituency: youth, and young adults. Sunaina Maira echoes Volpp’s conceptualizing and further points out that

Muslim youth, both citizens as well as non-citizens, face particular challenges as they are “coming of age in U.S. society at a moment when their religious and national affiliations are politically charged issues tied to the state’s War on Terror, both within and beyond U.S. borders” (4). For the Muslim youths in Maira’s study, citizenship is understood to be a tenuous compromise which affords certain economic opportunities but does not guarantee civil rights (15). Maira’s study is illuminating because it indicates that the Othered youth is aware of the cultural politics shaping its exclusion but may not always be in a position to rebut it because of a vulnerable legal or social position in the empire. I do not intend to valorize resistance in my project so I want to note that subaltern subjects find different ways of navigating the fraught political landscape that don’t involve broad social movements. In a related work intended to humanize Muslim youth, Bayoumi suggests that Arab and Muslim American youth negotiated through hegemonic institutions and cultural landscapes in small, but key rejections of their

Othered status. For Yasmin, a young high school girl, this rejection took the form of a legal challenge to religious discrimination in her school, while for other youth, like Lina and Rami, the experience of Othering led to a religious transformation and a desire to find solidarity with other Muslims and through religion (100, 148, 225). The key factor which unites these youth is their attempt to carve out an identity different from the one bestowed on them by the imperial ideology.

As Maira and Bayoumi’s works indicate, reform does not always take the form of vast organized social movements that contest the Othering of Muslims, Arabs, and

South Asians. A grassroots minority nationalism directs the South Asian subjects in The

Domestic Crusaders, My Name is Khan, and New York to engage in civic, legal, and educational activism or in radicalism to reshape the national conversation about

Muslims in America. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the Pakistani protagonist, rejects his transnational privileges and returns to Pakistan to counteract the transnational capitalist structure which undergirds the American empire by engaging in a strategic nationalism. This kind of nationalism posits the nation-state as a protective site which can support and promote subaltern rights that might be de-privileged in the processes of globalization. It is important to note that although the approaches in these works are about nation-ness, these approaches are not incompatible with cosmopolitan awareness. To the contrary, these approaches are forged and deployed by subjects with cosmopolitan consciousness, and who express transnational solidarity. Moreover, any reading of these works must account for the transnational economies within which the works themselves circulate. These economies are best illustrated with the two

Bollywood films: produced in India, shot in the United States, India, and elsewhere, and distributed globally among the South Asian diaspora. In fact, even though these films are narratively enabling nationalism, their production economies indicate that they are also being used by Othered members of the South Asian diaspora to affirm their transnational roots and consciousness.

Finally, my project engages with the possibilities that nationalistic approaches

(rather than explicitly or mainly transnational ones) present to subaltern subjects while

recognizing that the nation-state has engaged in the cultural and juridical Othering of these same subjects, and hence, may be hostile or resistant to these approaches. Thus,

I also examine how these approaches are open to co-optation by the hegemonic logic of the empire. What is the impact of grass-roots resistance and mobilizing on the continued Othering of Muslims in the United States? Can acts of activism and radicalism interrupt an Orientalist discourse?

Critique and Defense of Nationalism

The passing of nationalism has been, perhaps, preemptively heralded by postcolonial studies scholars who have critiqued it, or called for cosmopolitanism to take its place. Frantz Fanon, for instance, articulated one of the most resounding critiques of nationalism related to anti-colonial movements. He anticipates the limitations of bourgeois nationalism if the national bourgeoisie becomes “content with [playing] the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent” (152-153). In such a condition, the anti-colonial movement concludes with a reproduction of the ills of colonization because the national bourgeoisie adopts the exploitative practices which characterized the colonial period (152). Fanon does not deny the capacity of the bourgeoisie to articulate and implement a vision of equality, but he points out that a failure to implement that vision after independence will eventually allow a narrow minded tribalism to shatter national unity (158). Similarly, Partha Chatterjee draws attention to the systematic exclusion of minorities in the newly constituted nation-state after independence. In The

Nation and Its Fragments, a work on Indian nationalism, Chatterjee writes that

ideals of freedom, equality, and cultural refinement went hand in hand with a set of dichotomies that systematically excluded from the new life of the nation the vast masses of people whom the dominant elite would represent and lead, but who could never be culturally integrated with their leaders (134).

The problems of false essentialisms and exclusions arise when nationalist projects construct national identity based on tradition, as a temporal, spatial, cultural location uncontaminated by colonization. In this process of reclaiming an originary past, or delimiting spiritual or cultural traditions as the basis of national consciousness, certain traditions are privileged over others. These privileged traditions become sedimented into hegemonic ideology when the promise of freedom and equality is unmet. Despite these concerns about anti-colonial and bourgeois nationalism,

Chatterjee does not suggest a post-national move. And Fanon’s work, when carefully parsed, indicates that the revolutionary potential of the bourgeois can not be underestimated. Before I discuss these two aspects, I want to briefly turn to Arjun

Appadurai, perhaps one of the most important theorists to uphold the potential of globalization and a post-national moment. In Modernity at Large, Appadurai’s seminal work on globalization, he argues that the cultural flows of globalization have challenged

“the salience, both methodological and ethical, of the nation-state” (9). Although he accepts that the move from transnational movements to transnational governance remains unchartered and unclear, he also believes that the nation-state concept is too beset by challenges to be viable unit of governance anymore (20). Thus, Appadurai raises the possibility that “cultural freedom and sustainable justice in the world do not presuppose the...existence of the nation-state” (23). I am not proposing that Appadurai, and other critics in this vein, have embraced globalization uncritically. Indeed, in the years since Modernity at Large was published, Appadurai himself has tempered his enthusiastic espousal of globalization. Yet, Appadurai’s words are emblematic of a recurrent strong critique of nationalism, and the nation-state as concepts that have

outlived their usefulness. To summarize, nationalism has been variously characterized as given to reproducing the oppressive logic of colonialism on minorities within the state, supporting neoimperialist practices, and engaging in narrow minded ethnic politics. Based on this characterization, the neoliberal nation-state is similarly critiqued as an outdated concept that has insufficiently protected minority rights.

These critiques of nationalism and the nation-state, however, fail to sufficiently account for the continuing popular appeal of nationalism. Instead, as Neil Lazarus writes, the resurgence of nationalism in recent years has “been seen as constituting a kind of return of the repressed” and nationalism is imputed to be “not merely…chauvinistic, but also that it only ever results in the violent intensification of already existing social divisions” (68-69). Lazarus characterizes such a generalization as disingenuous because it casts the nationalism of the metropolitan West as a completed project, and benign and modern (in contradistinction to the anarchic and irrational nationalisms of the Global South), and points out that this critique of nationalism emanates in elitist centers and conditions within capitalist nations in the

West (69). In a similar vein, Chatterjee writes that the move to impute recent nationalism and its attendant issues to the so called Third World is a form of “amnesia on the [European] origins of nationalism and more than a hint of anxiety about whether it has been tamed in the land of its birth” (4). Such an attribution of nationalism to the

Third World also elides the recent social and political minority movements in the West, for eg, the Civil Rights movement in the United States.

Moreover, even critics such as Chatterjee are not suggesting an end to nationalism or the nation-state. To the contrary, Chatterjee argues that the nation-state

should be a testing ground for cosmopolitanism so that “a more satisfactory resolution of the problems within [the nation-state] could give us some of the theoretical instruments we are looking for to tackle the questions beyond” (Beyond the Nation? 57).

These problems include the nation-state’s failure at effective governance, and its failure to “provide a secure foundation for a proper relationship between autonomous individual lives in society and the collective political domain of the state” (65). While the former keeps the nation-state from meeting the welfare needs of its citizens, the latter leads to a charge of totalitarianism or authoritarianism against the nation-state. Chatterjee suggests that these problems must be solved within the confines of the territorial state first, because the current “framework of global modernity will… [otherwise] inevitably structure the world according to a pattern that is profoundly colonial” (68). Chatterjee’s observation is borne out in the transnational capitalist system which undergirds the

7modern empire, and deepens inequalities. This transnational system is not more ethically responsible just by virtue of being global. In support of Chatterjee’s observation, Pheng Cheah concurs that when neoliberal ideology is aligned with idealistic visions of globalization, as a force to “unify us into a common humanity, the moral universalism of human rights discourse can, paradoxically, be used to justify economic globalization as a form of postcolonial civilizing mission” (145). That human rights discourse can be used to support military intervention in the Global South is a not unheard of occurrence in contemporary world history.

It is against the ravages of uneven globalization that Samir Amin posits his concept of a strategic popular nationalism. I will develop this idea further in the next

7 As Hardt and Negri would note, the modern empire itself has overcome territorial boundaries.

chapter, but briefly, this kind of nationalism brings the citizen into the protective ambit of the nation-state, which wields its power on behalf of its citizens, and represents their interests globally. Finally, Chatterjee’s proposition is important in the context of my project because the Orientalist discourse deployed by the American empire had domestic as well as international consequences. The jingoistic nationalism which eventually led to military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq has its domestic counterpart in the various acts and policies which gave state support to Muslim

Othering. In fact, a jingoistic American nationalism was disguised in the rhetoric of human rights, liberty, and democracy so that military intervention could be justified. Only a transnational approach to address issues of Orientalism, hegemony, and empire will be insufficient to dismantle the entrenched national sensibilities within the territorial state.

Thus far in this debate over cosmopolitanism and transnational structure and nationalism and the nation-state, I have not discussed an important factor: minority rights. On the one hand, minorities might choose to remain invested in the nation-state to pursue their rights, and on the other, transnational power structure might themselves be insufficient protectors of minority rights. While international bodies such as the

United Nations are active supporters of human rights, and can bring substantial global pressure on nations, their regulatory power is also dependent on the will of member- nations, and susceptible to the neoimperial policies of the empire. The influence of these international bodies should not be understated, but it is important to recognize, as

Appadurai admits, that transnational regulatory bodies and structures are still in an emergent state (20). These bodies do not guarantee rights to national or cosmopolitan

subjects, and subjects who accept cosmopolitan or transnational identities as a result of

Othering may be doing so under duress. In its most extreme and material form, this last factor has been witnessed in exile and forced migration.

Some minority subjects might also be unwilling to cede their citizenship, and this has precedence in early Asian American history itself. The Othering of South Asian

Muslims has an earlier historical precedent: the cultural, political, and legal marginalization of Asian Americans in the United States in the early and mid- twentieth century. Without putting these two events in a 8comparative framework, the detention of

Muslims after 9/11 has certain parallels with Japanese internment during World War II.

This earlier precedence of Othering was also supported by state policy (including acts on immigration, land use, and miscegenation). Despite this troubled history and association with the state, Asian immigrants, staked a claim to the American nation.

These tensions over belonging have also played out in Asian American literary texts of the first half of the twentieth century. Aiiieeeee!, the 1974 anthology of Asian American literature, contains what has since become a polarizing introduction to the exclusion of

Asian Americans from the public sphere, the repercussions of this exclusion, and a call for the reclaiming of the American nation. The editors, including the noted writer and critic Frank Chin, decry the perpetual Otherness of Asian Americans whose unique

Asian-American sensibilities are not recognized as a part of American literature despite their almost century long presence in the United States (viii-ix). These marginalized subjects have no intention of claiming a different nation-state or a cosmopolitan identity,

88 It is certainly important to not consider these two events as equivalent given differences in context, scope, method, and other factors. However, Asian American Studies scholars have evoked Japanese internment in discussions of post-9/11 detentions with regard to the racial politics of citizenship and the policing of racialized bodies by the state.

because they considered themselves a part of the territorial American nation, and intended to rewrite its dominant literary and cultural codes.

This stubborn reclaiming is given form in the exclamation, “AIIIEEEEE!!!”, a cry that represents not only anger and despair but also the long stifled voice of a marginalized people who refused to be silent any longer (Aiiieeeee! Preface viii). This cry is unapologetically angry and bitter, and refused to be conciliatory to white hegemonic sensibilities. In a different essay, Frank Chin and Jeffery Paul Chan use non-normative language, as one way to channel their Asian-American sensibility, and express their intention of challenging white hegemony: “us Chinamans mean to reverse the charges with our writing. The object of our writing is no different from that of any other writer. We mean to inject our sensibility into the culture and make it work there”

(Racist Love 79). Although the cultural nationalism articulated by Chin and others has since been critiqued for being defined upon heteropatriarchal norms, it is an important call nonetheless. Jinqi Ling writes that, by affirming “their Americanness through a discourse of citizenship, [these writers]…mobilized a dominant trope and a universalist claim on liberty and progress” (Ling 25). In other words, minority subjects drew upon the foundational principles outlined in the American constitution, as well as the international human rights discourse to issue a public call for rights. Despite its limitations, Asian

Americans saw the call for a counterhegemonic nationalism as an act of dissent, rather than a capitulation to the hegemonic conceptualization of citizenship and belonging because it challenged the racialized grounds on which that conceptualization had been crafted (Ling 25).

In a broader context, cultural products, such as literary texts, have been actively engaged in these debates over the nation-state and nationalism, as evidenced in the

Third World literatures now covered under Postcolonial Studies and the Asian American literature addressed in the previous sections. Simon Gikandi writes that due to a

“cultural turn in global studies,” critics looking for the processes of the new world order have frequently privileged literary texts like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, but even readings of these cosmopolitan texts are incomplete “without an engagement with the nation-state, its history, its foundational mythologies, and its quotidian experiences”

(Gikandi 632, 634). Thus, even cultural products which are at the forefront of imagining the new world order are still inherently rooted in an opposition to the existing world order, the nation-state.

Re-Imagining the Nation-State

As I mentioned earlier, this project examines the reclamation of the nation-state by South Asian Muslims, who articulate their citizenship and belonging through acts of activism and radicalism. In my first chapter, I examine two literary texts, The Reluctant

Fundamentalist, a novel by the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, and The Domestic

Crusaders, a play by the American-Pakistani playwright Wajahat Ali. I begin my analysis with The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a work about the political awakening of a young

Pakistani subject who first enjoys the privileges of globalization and elite cosmopolitanism, and then rejects it for advancing the hegemony of the American empire. This work is an outlier among the other works I analyze in one sense: its protagonist is a Pakistani citizen who returns to Pakistan at the end of the novel. It is relevant to my project, though, because the subject is politically and socially activated due to his experience of marginalization and alienation after-9/11 in the United States,

and the shadow of the American empire follows him to Pakistan. This is an important work for my project for two reasons first, it establishes the transnational capitalist structures within which the empire operates (a point that I will develop in conjunction with Hardt and Negri’s Empire), and the need for a strategic popular nationalism in the

Global South. Second, this work speaks to the ambiguous and unexpected consequences of a reconstituted nationalism.

I juxtapose the ambiguous ending of The Reluctant Fundamentalist with the similarly unresolved conclusion of The Domestic Crusaders. The latter work attempts to deconstruct damaging stereotypes about American Muslims by presenting a Muslim

American family beset by challenges unique to Muslims living in the United States. This work also presents the strategies taken up by young citizens who find that their claims to citizenship and national belonging have been challenged post-9/11. These young subjects face a duality similar to the one faced by Asian Americans decades ago. They are called upon by the hegemonic order to declare their fealty to the American state, but such a declaration must be made in opposition to their Muslim identity. At the same time, these subjects remain suspect because of their Muslimness. These subjects attempt to craft a Muslim American ethos by proposing civic activism within the

American cultural and territorial space. However, the play ends on a stalemate and leaves unaddressed questions about the success of such an engagement with the neoliberal state. This play also introduces the specter of radicalism, which is presented here in the context of past foreign radicalism but becomes contemporary, domestic, and urgent later in the two Bollywood films.

These literary works stage an important intervention in 9/11 fiction by presenting subaltern perspectives on the attack and its aftermath. Both works have been critically acclaimed. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, published in 2007, has since drawn academic as well as popular attention. Many American universities have subscribed the book for the freshman common reading programs. Mira Nair, the noted film maker, is also directing a film based on the book that is slated for release in May 2013. The

Domestic Crusaders was the first Muslim-American play to debut on Off Broadway in

2009. It was favorably reviewed by critics, and was published by McSweeney’s in 2010.

Both works are invested in deconstructing the image of the Muslim Other that has become pervasive in the re-energized Orientalist discourses in American culture.

Stereotypes about Islam, Muslims, and nations associated with Islam gained popular currency even in such supposedly objective fields as journalism and media. Within this charged and hegemonic public sphere, these works attempt to circulate a counter- discourse that critiques the Othering of South Asian Muslims.

These works also present an alternative subaltern perspective which has not been a part of dominant post-9/11 American literature. Margaret Scanlan, in an essay titled “Migrating from Terror: The postcolonial novel after September 11” notes the emergence of the ‘terrorist novel’post-9/11. She argues that earlier works, such as John

Updike’s Terrorist and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, reinforced the hegemonic rhetoric in

America, because, among other reasons, these works did not “create a context that could include ordinary Muslims, people with differing political and religious perspectives”

(267). In response to this tradition, Scanlan traces novels by Hisham Matar, Kiran

Desai, and Mohsin Hamid, as writing against this tradition to “revise the West’s vision of

itself as a haven for the oppressed, a fortress of secular reason besieged by a fanatical

Orient, whose latest representatives are migrants bearing bombs and contagion” (267).

In a related critique, Elizabeth Anker writes that the 9/11 novel “enlists allegory to contain and manage the ambivalent afterlives of 9/11, marshaling overridingly conservative reactions to the event” (463). Such literary works display an ambivalent historical consciousness, exposing the selective amnesia which attempts to cover

American imperialism and simultaneously exhibiting a longing to return to a past. Anker argues that “nostalgia with the 9/11 novel encodes…a longing to return to a bygone era of American omnipotence wherein white, heteronormative, patrician masculinity was still sacrosanct” (468). Even more troubling, is the tendency of the 9/11 novel to gloss over racial politics in the post-9/11 milieu so that issues of race are sanitized and diminished.

This is a charge that Anker brings to bear on works such as DeLillo’s Falling Man and

Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. These omissions, Anker writes, mirror “American myopia as well as [signal] a damaging denial of [9/11’s] global repercussions” (469).

In a similar vein, Peter Morey argues that early fiction about 9/11 “took the form of “trauma narratives”… or “Muslim misery memoirs” (136). The former “attempting to trace the psychological scarring and mental realignment of characters caught up in the

Twin Towers attacks” and the latter “[serving] to underscore the injustices of Islamic rule and justify neoconservative interventionism” (136). Novels like The Reluctant

Fundamentalist then are interrogative projects that engage in deterrorialization and compel “readers to think about what lies behind the totalizing categories of East and

West” (137). In an essay on the aesthetics of post-9/11 fiction, Rachel Greenwald Smith writes that the post-9/11 novel has failed to create new forms or aesthetic experiences,

despite the fact that a trauma, such as 9/11, “offers opportunities for new ways of seeing and new ways of thinking, and we expect this upheaval in sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience to transform literature” (155). In relation to this commentary,

Smith writes that a novel such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and

Incredibly Close, even when it deploys experimental techniques ultimately makes “a formal argument in favor of retaining a consistency of U.S.-centric values and experience” (158).

Such critiques of 9/11 novels, as a genre, and particularly of preeminent

American writers like Updike and DeLillo, appear to be harsh, particularly since these writers are very much invested in exposing the American exceptionalism which Anker and others accuse them of inevitably parading. Richard Gray’s essay, “Open Doors,

Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis,” which has now been cited frequently in analyses of 9/11 fiction, sheds some light on the critique of these works.

According to Gray, these works suffer from a failure of the imagination in several ways.

Firstly, they focus on early stages of trauma in which time is irreparably split into before and after time and the trauma is unrepresentable, irreconcilable, and hence, a “historical and experiential abyss” (130). Due to the inexpressible nature of this trauma, its disruptive force is subsumed to the personal and domestic, and the 9/11 novels

“assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures” (134). By this Gray means that the opportunities presented by this disruption (for eg, a critical look at American hegemony, or new literary forms) can not emerge from these novels. Secondly, Gray writes that these dominant 9/11 novels are inadequate in their handling of ‘strangeness’, a concept comparable to Otherness. The contemporary novel must address the liminality of

borders which enable transnational processes that, in turn, disrupt easy formulations of

“them” and “us” (135). (This is not to suggest that the transnational processes are positive. The 9/11 novel must also examine how imperial ideologies are floated through these processes.) Although the 9/11 novels are set in this liminal world, and derive creative energy from a traumatic event that has transnational linkages, these works turn inward to the domestic context and are supportive of hegemonic ideology.

I look instead, to The Reluctant Fundamentalist and The Domestic Crusaders to look for an alternative imaginary that addresses Otherness without reproducing it on its protagonists. My project begins with an analysis of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a work that sets up the uneven economic globalization which results from the practices of the American empire internationally. Most scholars like Scanlan have analyzed this work from a cosmopolitan perspective, given that its protagonist travels internationally to develop a political consciousness, and this consciousness is rooted in an understanding of transnational capitalism. While such an approach is productive, it insufficiently accounts for his embrace of a national sphere for activism at the end of the work. I foreground this national activism, and argue for its need by looking at the works of

Samir Amin, Pheng Cheah, and Hardt and Negri. The second part of the first chapter examines The Domestic Crusaders, another coming of age story set in the United

States. The play evokes the ethos of Bayoumi and Maira’s work, in that it addresses how Othered youth negotiate their alienation and marginalization in society. The play is particularly successful in nuancing intergenerational and generational responses to

Othering and destabilizing any notion of a fixed or privileged form of resistance. Despite

its sensitive treatment of these issues, the work has not drawn significant scholarly attention yet.

These two works offer a contrast to the two Bollywood films in that they qualify an embrace of nationalism, and envision potential challenges from the empire to the activism and radicalism espoused by subjects. The two films, My Name is Khan and

New York, which I analyze in the second chapter, are bounded by social convention, push normative ideals on citizenship and belonging. They also conclude on idealistic notes by positing the onset of a post-Othering era. Despite these issues however, these films are important cultural texts that reverse the stereotypical portrayals of Muslims in

Hollywood and Bollywood films for decades. Unfortunately, 9Hollywood continues to promote damaging images of Muslims and Arabs after 9/11. Most of these films are in the action, thriller, or war genres, and they can be divided into two categories based on their geographical locatedness. A small number of films are set on American soil, while most of them are war films set in various locations, but not necessarily shot, in the

Middle East, Pakistan, or Afghanistan. In these next few paragraphs, I will briefly review some of these films to highlight their presentation of Muslims and Muslim countries.

In almost all the films, the trope of the Muslim as an Other who is prone to violence (fundamentalist or otherwise), is recycled in some manner. Two of these films

United 93 (2006), about the ill-fated hijacked flight, and World Trade Center (2006), about fire fighters trapped in the World Trade Center rubble, have been much feted in popular culture for addressing the attacks on the World Trade Center. Both films although based on real characters or incidents, engage in myth making. These films

9 Slocum draws attention to the dearth of scholarship on this issue in his review essay on media scholarship after 9/11.

return the American viewer to the moment of unresolved national trauma for therapeutic purposes. James Stone, in an essay on the visual pleasure of watching destruction, writes that while the attacks on the World Trade Center were turned into a spectacle,

Hollywood was reluctant to address this destruction 10directly (170). Thus, in these two films, fire fighters and flight passengers are crafted as heroes so that the films provide figures around whom the nation can coalesce and celebrate an indomitable American spirit. Thomas Riegler labels these films as narratives of the “citizen soldier” that present triumphalist accounts of survival (157). In order to pursue this goal neither film provides a larger political or international context (which might indict American policies) for the attacks.

Some of the other Hollywood films which are set substantially in the United

States, and include major Muslim characters include Traitor (2008) and Unthinkable

(2010), both about Muslim terrorists who attempt to set off bombs in various public spaces. Both films raise ethical questions about government policies and actions after

9/11, and attempt to nuance the portrayal of the Muslim terrorist by adding depth to their characters and motivations. However, both films reinforce the cultural Othering of

Muslims, particularly by repeating the stereotype of Muslims as terrorists who stand against Western values, and are ultimately alien to the American fabric of life. In a review of Traitor, for instance, Wajahat Ali critiques the film’s characterization of Muslim

Americans and depiction of “an America that is heavily infiltrated with assimilated

Muslim American citizens who—at the drop of a time—are ready to carry out suicide,

10 Stone’s essay suggests that other genres or films (even those that don’t address Othered figures directly) may also hold potential for studying Hollywood’s treatment of minorities after 9/11. Stone, and others look at science fiction as an alternative genre to study Othering, alienation, and the visual pleasure of destruction.

terrorist missions” (Ali Review). Such mischaracterization encourages suspicion of all

Muslims living in America.

Many of the other films that are set in the geopolitical realities of a post-9/11 world are war films set in the Middle East, Pakistan, or Afghanistan, or they are films about political intrigue. These films are populated by American soldiers, agents, and advisors, civilians in now war torn areas, and the agents, advisors, and bureaucrats of other governments. Muslim terrorists are staples in such films. Syriana (2005) was one of the earliest films that explicitly locates its referential framework in the post-9/11 world.

The film presents the transnational, and frequently nefarious, politics of oil that draw on a diversity of actors, ranging from governments and corporations to lobbyists and migrant labor. Both Syriana, and later films like The Kingdom (2007) trace America’s vested interest in the Middle East over oil production and supply, and speak to

American national interest in Iraq and Afganistan, the two international spheres directly impacted by the post-9/11 jingoistic nationalism.

The largest body of these films have been war films, following the lives of soldiers or covert agents, both involved in counter-insurgency action. Redacted (2007), Rendition

(2007), The Hurt Locker (2009), Green Zone (2010) are some of the films which explore the military and covert operations initiated by the United States after 9/11. These films are often critical of American military and covert operations and the myopic government which directs the theatre of war from afar. One of the purposes of these films is to reveal ground realities of war, and the films particularly foreground the frustrations of

American soldiers and covert agents who begin to question the ethics of war. These representations run against the grain of official discourse which justifies military

interventions and troop surges with ideological standpoints. Viewers are primarily aligned with the perspective of and empathize with the American soldiers and agents, who although suffering in the war, are still privileged in relation to the civilians in the region. Thus, although the works are set in international locales, and draw upon a situation populated with ‘strangeness’ (as Richard Gray might phrase it), the films continue to use American protagonists as heroes to draw the audience’s empathy. The

Others depicted in these films are supporting or secondary characters.

This action/war genre of film making remains popular among film makers, and recent films like Zero Dark Thirty (2012) are its latest iterations which privilege a hegemonic American perspective. This last film, which has garnered rave reviews, has also been critiqued for its perspective on torture. The film traces the decade long search for Osama bin Laden and vividly documents the various forms of torture used by

American agencies to obtain leads on his whereabouts. While such a depiction of torture might serve to awaken a viewer’s empathy for the tortured subject, reviewers have also criticized the film’s perspective on torture, namely for playing up the role torture played in eventually finding bin Laden. Matt Taibbi maintains in a review that the film presents torture “without perspective” and a more accurate depiction would highlight the misleading information that torture produces, its moral corruption of torturers, and its role in undermining American credibility internationally (Taibbi). In this line of argument, the film is a direct predecessor of earlier films such as United 93 and World Trade

Center. Despite its flawed heroes, it upholds the spirit of American exceptionalism.

Similar issues over Muslim representation have also followed Bollywood films.

India’s largest film industry, and now a global presence, Bollywood’s entanglement with

Muslim representation is deeper than Hollywood’s and intrinsically tied to the politics and communal struggles within the Indian nation-state, and the often tense Indo-Pak relations. The 1950s and 1960s saw the flourishing genre of the Muslim Social, in which

Indian Muslim protagonists were central to the film. Well known Muslims Socials include

Mughal-e-Azam and Pakeezah. These films were often set in the socio-political context of Mughal rule in India, and depicted that cultural heritage with respect. Chadha and

Kavoori argue that in this first phase of representation, Muslims, specifically the Muslim aristocracy, were cast as exotic Others who had impeccable manners and lived romantic lives amidst grandeur (136-137). Although these films did not account for the lived reality of Muslim life in India, they idealized the Mughal aristocracy and period. The marked turn in the depiction of Muslim characters came after the 1970s. According to

Chadha and Kavoori, this phase is marked by marginalization, so that “while Muslim protagonists were present in the narrative and not entirely erased, they only appeared in the margins, with their appearance conforming to an implicit representational code”

(138-139). Some of these explicit identifiers were skull caps, sherwanis, paan (betel leaf), and prayer beads. Films such as Amar Akbar Anthony and Sholay epitomized the marginalization of India Muslim protagonists on screen. This time period marked the rise of secular films that depicted communal unity as well as the rise of negative depictions of Muslims.

The latter type continued to gain currency in the 80s, and by the 90s, the Muslim as terrorist Other type had become ossified in Bollywood. In this last stage of representation, Muslims were now the demonized Other, and presented as criminals, corrupt bureaucrats, terrorists, or Pakistani war mongers (Chadha and Kavoori 140).

Sumita S. Chakrovarty labels the rendering of the Indian Muslim as ““the undecidable, he whose loyalty to the motherland could not be counted upon and needed to be ritually affirmed” (238). This ritual of reaffirmation was fulfilled through the Bollywood film.

Chakrovarty also draws attention to another change after the 90s – references to

Pakistan became more explicit, and the collapsing of religious and national identities

(i.e. Pakistan with Islam) further alienated the Indian Muslim protagonist on screen.

Such dramatic cinematic changes reflect the turbulent times faced by the Indian state in the 80s and 90s. Two successful assassinations of Indian prime ministers (India Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguard in 1984, and Rajiv Gandhi by a suicide bomber belonging to the

Tamil Tigers in 1991), the demolition of the Babri Masjid (and ensuing communal riots) in 1992, the Bombay Blasts in 1993, and the Kargil War in 1999 are a few pivotal events which speak to the tensions over communalism, terrorism, militancy, and nationhood in

India during that time period. Roja (1993), Sarfarosh (1999), and Mission Kashmir

(2000) mark the concurrent turn towards demonization of Muslims on screen. All three films deal with concerns of terrorism in India, Muslim separatist groups in Kashmir, in

Roja and Mission Kashmir, and terrorists sponsored by the Pakistani state in the latter.

Indian Muslims characters are depicted as violent fundamentalists who maintain ties with Pakistan and attempt to undermine the Indian state through terrorism. Although the

Kashmir issue serves as the de facto motivation for terrorist activities in these films, they make “no substantive attempt…to portray the complexities of the political situation in

Kashmir and its manipulation by politicians on both sides or of the factors that underpin militancy in the region” (Chadha and Kavoori 142).

The latter depiction of Muslims as Others, either internal Others who are terrorists or external (i.e. Pakistani) Others who threaten India, has continued in the post-9/11 years, fuelled by international tensions, as well as regional events. LOC Kargil

(2003) recreates the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan, and follows in the tradition of earlier films such as Border (1997) which purportedly condemn war, but also serve to celebrate the Indian army. Several films continue to show Pakistani sponsored

Muslim terrorists operating in India. I bring up these films not to question their accuracy or objectivity with regard to characters or events (after all, they are dramatizations and make no claim to realist depictions) but rather to point out that their negative depiction of Muslims is not counterbalanced within the Bollywood film industry. Later films continue to marginalize or demonize Muslims. For instance, Fanaa (2006) recreates the character of the terrorist Muslim with divided loyalties who is eventually killed by his

Indian lover in order to stop him from delivering crucial equipment to his terrorist group.

The film does humanize the terrorist by showing his concern for his lover, and entrapment in a culture of violence, but it also serves to reiterate the staged conflict between religion and nation which Muslim characters, but not other national subjects, are put through. Bollywood films have rarely dealt with the socio-economic and political challenges faced by Muslim communities in India. And although Muslims are a crucial part of film production, and some of the most bankable actors in the film industry are

Muslim, these actors are generally called upon to play characters, who are identified either as non-religious or as characters with Hindu names. This incongruity is not as glaring as it may appear to be – these actors work in depoliticized contexts in which

social reality is expected to be divorced from cinematic depiction. These actors are also not expected to demonstrate an energetic Muslim identification in their daily life.

Shah Rukh Khan, who plays the lead role in My Name is Khan, is no stranger to the paradoxes of being Muslim in India, and in the post-9/11 world. In 2010, after he expressed regret that Pakistani players had not been included in that year’s Indian

Premier League, an international cricket series, Hindu nationalists threated violence if

My Name is Khan was released. Khan was called insensitive and said to have “insulted

Mumbai, given the 2008 terror attack here by militants trained in Pakistan” (Yardley). In

2013, he became the center of another controversy over an article he wrote for Outlook magazine. In the article, he drew attention to his repeated racial profiling and strip searching at American airports because of his name, and being chosen as a community representative in India to denounce any “act of violence in the name of Islam” to disavow the larger community’s belief in non-violence (Outlook). In a section which inflamed many Hindu nationalists, Khan observed that he had

sometimes become the inadvertent object of political leaders who choose to make me a symbol of all that they think is wrong and unpatriotic about Muslims in India. There have been occasions when I have been accused of bearing allegiance to our neighbouring nation rather than my own country – this even though I am an Indian who father fought for the freedom of India. Rallies have been held were leaders have exhorted me to leave my home and return to what they refer to as my “original homeland” (Outlook).

I quote this extended section because it gives a small glimpse at the climate in which

Bollywood films are rooted, and in which they are interpreted. This section was selectively chosen by nationalists and misinterpreted as showing Khan’s ingratitude to the Indian people and nation. Neither his heritage, nor his status in India makes Khan immune to charges of divided loyalty, a charge faced by Muslims in India as well as the

United States. Although the article expresses both gratitude to his Indian fans, and pride

in the Indian nation, the selective reading of Khan’s ‘critique’ (if it does qualify to be called that) indicates the unwillingness of Hindu nationalists, and others in the media, to brook any critique or even acknowledgement of the social, political, and economic conditions that Indian Muslims live in. My analysis of these two films in Chapter 3 acknowledges these transnational networks and production economies in which the films are made meaningful.

CHAPTER 2 LOCATING SITES OF RESISTANCE IN MOHSIN HAMID’S THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST AND WAJAHAT ALI’S THE DOMESTIC CRUSADERS

In a far-reaching argument about the problematic linkages between American empire and culture, Ashley Dawson writes that “US global hegemony and the transnational economic, political, and ideological networks on which it relies have been virtually invisible in the realm of domestic cultural production” (Dawson 250). Dawson’s claim that cultural products have failed to expose American imperialism, especially

“transnational networks of power” is troublingly true of the post-9/11 moment (250). A myopic focus on the national stage and sentiment enabled the jingoistic nationalism which, in turn, resulted in the foreign and domestic policy issues that I outlined in the

Introduction. Dawson’s critique, particularly in reference to literature, is echoed more directly by other scholars writing about post-9/11 fiction. A similar critique as articulated by other scholars such as Margaret Scanlan and Richard Gray is also discussed in the

Introduction.

As I note in the Introduction, nationalism provides a productive lens in the context of literature and popular culture, to study how these works of literature and popular culture address issues of Othering, hegemonic power structures, and citizenship.

Specifically, these works embrace the nation by performing activism on a national stage

(Pakistan, in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and the United States, in The Domestic

Crusaders), but with a transnational consciousness that avoids the myopic perspective

Dawson writes about. More than the films I analyze in the next chapter, both these works are concerned with an emergent, rather than established, activism. As a result, the protagonists’ developing political consciousness as a response to their Othering is a key part of the novel as well as play. These protagonists are the fictive foils to the

Muslim youth of whom Bayoumi and Maira write about. They grapple with questions of identity, belonging, and citizenship. Above all, each of these youths strives to find an appropriate and satisfying response to their Othering. Their responses are not all activism oriented, and while some are proposed, others are already in effect. Moreover, the protagonists do not all produce responses that are Islamic in nature, even if they are

Othered as Muslims. Indeed, the protagonist of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is turned into a Muslim through interpellation by a hostile society rather than by self-identification.

His activism remains driven by his affiliation as a Pakistani national than a Muslim (in this sense, he is both a nationalist as well as an activist). In this chapter I examine these various nuances of activism in the two works: the spaces and forms of these activisms, the challenge they pose to the American empire, and the response of the empire to the citizen-activists. Given the focus on youth, this chapter is substantially devoted to how

Othering leads to the development of a political consciousness that is expressed through activism.

Economic Fundamentalism and Popular Nationalism in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

To situate the economic fundamentalism which lies at the heart of The Reluctant

Fundamentalist and inspires a change in the protagonist, it is first necessary to review certain key ideas developed by Hardt and Negri on Empire, and Pheng Cheah, and

Samir Amin on economic globalization. Hardt and Negri, although often critiqued now for prematurely anticipating an end to empire, establish important facets about the new world order in the post-colonial world. They argue that the modern day Empire, a concept not synonymous with imperialism, is characterized by a “spatial totality” - it hews to no territorial borders (xiv). They also argue that the Empire presents itself as

outside temporality, a fixed state of affairs, and that its rule “operates on all registers of the social order” (xv). All these characterizations give the Empire substantial power to affect the lives of people because it structures itself as an arbiter and regulator of ethics and human nature. In essence, it has the capacity for comprehensive power and control across geographies and societies. Hardt and Negri’s concept of the Empire subsumes the traditional understanding of the American empire, the latter (with a small ‘e’) could be seen as an important node that is capable of injecting certain values into the transnational operation of Empire. In my analysis, I foreground the American empire, rather than the Empire, as a hegemonic and oppressive institution because it wields more influence on the latter’s transnational operations than do other contemporary nodes of power. Moreover, Hardt and Negri’s concept is useful in establishing certain parameters for the operation of the American empire which certainly aspires to transgress spatiality in terms of its power but it does so in order to funnel resources

(material, labor, etc) to a territorial state and its beneficiaries. This empire also operates on an internal hegemonic and moral ethic which justifies its outward push. For instance, the discourse of international human rights can be deployed to mask nationalistic projects in other countries.

Perhaps these deterretorialized ethico-political operations of the empire are best revealed in the transnational capitalist system which undergirds the empire and carries its value system internationally. Pheng Cheah writes that states become denationalized when they “engage in the implementation of the global economic system by internalizing its legal, economic, and managerial rules, standards, and concepts” (Inhuman

Conditions 32). Furthermore, deregulation and the weakening of state sovereignty, a

part of this system, “serves the predatory rights of global capital” because it leaves subjects without the protective sphere of the nation-state. Instead, subjects, now interpellated as labor, serve the global marketplace and are exposed to its inequalities, hierarchies of power, and dehumanizing effects. Samir Amin articulates this Marxist critique strongly when he discusses global polarization. He argues that that the

“globalization via the market” stance is a “reactionary utopia” and gives privileged nations monopolies over technology, financial markets, worldwide natural resources, media and communication, and advanced weaponry (4-5). In such a context, nationalism, even if it is construed as a project of protectionism, benefits citizens.

Cheah and Amin’s concerns about predatory capitalism are borne out in The

Reluctant Fundamentalist. Transnational flows bring subjects from the Global South to the center of the empire where they are co-opted into doing the work of the empire.

Suitably, the protagonist serves in a corporate, apparently cosmopolitan, system which eventually reveals its imperial ideology. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a tale of political awakening narrated in retrospect by a Pakistani nationalist, Changez, to an unnamed, mysterious American. Changez and the American are in a post-9/11 milieu in

Pakistan, and the story unfolds through extensive flashbacks. The plot is narrated entirely in a first person monologue by Changez, and his voice mediates the perspectives and views presented in the book. The American’s questions and reactions, too, are presented to the reader by Changez. Many ambiguities are incorporated into the plot: it remains unclear whether the American is friendly, or a spy sent to assassinate Changez, whether Changez is a non-violent activist or has become a violent reactionary, and the book finally ends on an ambiguous note. Changez’

flashbacks trace his younger years in America, first as a student at Princeton and later as a well-paid business analyst at Underwood Samson, a fictional valuation firm in New

York. In his flashbacks, Changez testifies to the changes that the United States undergoes post-9/11, and how Othering leads him to develop a political consciousness and become an activist.

In the pre-9/11, Changez enjoys the benefits of being aligned with a global capitalistic economy that is apparently based on a meritocracy, rather than identity politics. Although the young Changez is aware of social inequalities, especially at

Princeton, where he is surrounded by financially privileged students, he hides his own struggles and strives to overcome his relative poverty through hard work. The retrospective Changez who narrates his story is aware that a process of selection mediates access to the elite side of globalization. This process of selection is skewed in the direction of what he later realizes is the American empire – while New York is the center of the globalized economy, his native Lahore’s glory lies in the past, now known only in the light of its magnificent ruins. This uneven economic development is not unrelated to colonial and neo-colonial factors. Further, access to the New York global centre and its elite labor opportunities are precluded by access to education, preferably at a well-known institution. Changez notes that even within the selective admissions process at Princeton, the odds are in favour of Americans, rather than Pakistanis. His entering class has only Pakistanis “two from a population of over a hundred million souls” (3). The importance of an American education at an elite institution becomes clearer when top firms come to recruit graduates here.

When he is hired at Underwood Samson, a fictional valuation firm and a top choice for graduating seniors, his dreams appear to have been realized in many ways.

Underwood Samson epitomizes a system where ambition, hard work, and intelligence appear to be valued over racial, religious, or national identity. The workplace has a mix of ethnic and gender differences – yet, Changez realizes that all the trainees are similar in terms of their elite educational background. Despite this uneasy understanding,

Changez attempts to find conciliation in an emergent deracialized identity that promises equality of access and treatment. As a trainee at the Underwood Samson office in New

York City, racial and ethnic ties are loosened in favor of a corporate identity, based on principles of efficiency, systematic pragmatism, and maximum return (36, 37). Changez sloughs off his Pakistani identity in favor of a corporate, apparently apolitical identity: being a trainee. Swept up in the multicultural glamour of the city, he declares that although he was “never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker” (33). Changez’ uneasy negotiation of a corporate, rather than ethnic or national identity, linked to a city should be interpreted as a cosmopolitan identity in formation. This identity formation contributes to his later political awakening so I would like to explore it in some detail first.

Saskia Sassen in Globalization and its Discontents observes that the new economic configuration of globalization is based on a grid of global cities, which serve as control nodes, headquarters, for service industries that mobilize capital flows.

Sassen argues that these cities are denationalized spaces with “transnational actors” who challenge the “constitution of citizenship” as linked to one nation (xx). These actors are the privileged and mobile elites who control corporate power and enact what Ong

has called “flexible citizenship,” or disadvantaged workers and minorities who are aligned with the city, rather than the nation, due to their localized “economic and political operations” as support units in the service sector (Ong 6; Sassen xxi). Changez could be said to embody flexible citizenship. Although he does not possess the multiple passports which symbolize the flexible citizenship of the elite Chinese migrants Ong surveys, Changez has transnational mobility by virtue of his work at a prestigious

American workplace. He is also strongly interested in accumulating “capital and social prestige” to return his family to its once grand position in the Lahore social hierarchy (6).

Changez is situated in the kind of flow of capital and labor encouraged by globalization.

His work places him not only in the service sector, which has become a marker of globalization, but also in New York City, a global center for the service industry in the

United States. The mobility and opportunities presented to Changez are characteristic of the experiences of corporate elites in the labor and capital flows that undergird globalization.

This post-national identity formation resonates with the belief that globalization would help set the stage to express a new kind of postnational belonging. However, this post-national identity formation is challenged, first, by Changez’ temptation to assimilate to an American identity, and second, by his Othering after 9/11, which forces him into a racial, national, and religious schema. In the first instance, his pursuit of a corporate cosmopolitan identity gradually turns into the pursuit of a hegemonic American identity.

His desire to assimilate is most clearly visible in his behavior in Manila on a business trip before 9/11, and his allegorical relationship with Erica, an American and a fellow

Princeton graduate, after 9/11. This undermining of his racial and national identity is

foreshadowed by key names in the text. While Hamid cautions the reader to avoid simplifying the book, the initials, “US”, (Underwood Samson) indicates that the firm is ultimately aligned closer with American imperialism that Changez initially understands.

Similarly, (Am)Erica, becomes the woman/nation he desires (Hamid 237). The Manila trip marks the culmination of his short lived, but intense desire to be identified both as a corporate elite as well as an American, to reap the benefits of both identities. His alignment of the two identities reveals that the former is endowed with gravitas in the light of the latter, which is privileged and which privileges the individual among other nationals.

Underwood Samson’s money earns Changez a first class ticket, and an expensive hotel suite, but it does not accord him the respect which he notices his Filipinos colleagues bestowing on his American colleagues. His American colleagues are

“instinctively” recognized as “members of the officer class of global business,” but

Changez has to act the part (65). Suddenly embarrassed of the poverty of Lahore, he adopts American mannerisms, and begins telling Filipinos that he is from New York.

This time, New York is not intended to represent a deterretorialized city or cosmopolitanism. Rather, Changez evokes its geographical rootedness, and in the process, attributes the city as a node in the American empire. Although he makes this attribution, he does not realize its implications till after 9/11.Changez is not unaware of his play acting, but he persists because it earns him the monetary and social privileges that his once wealthy family possessed. Temporarily, his presence in an American service industry, enables him to reclaim the elite position his family enjoyed.

Manila, however, also marks the beginning of the change in Changez as the events of 9/11 unfold the night before his team is set to return to New York. His instinctive reaction (“I smiled”) as he watches the towers shocks him and the moment brands him as un-American. When he returns to the U.S., he finds that he has also been branded as anti- American, an Other, and he endures longer questioning and checking at the airport while his colleagues leave him to reunite with their families.

Gradually, this Othering is also reflected in his rejection by Erica, who appeared, initially, to be interested in him. In order to woo Erica, who is locked into bereavement for a long dead lover, Changez, at one point, asks Erica to pretend that he is Chris, her dead lover, so they can have sexual intercourse. Her long mourning is reminiscent of the trope of pining that is common in the tradition of romantic love. However, her embrace of nostalgia is also a reflection of the post-9/11 moment in the United States. If his short lived and failed relationship with Erica is read as an allegory for his relationship with America, these words about how he should proceed with his relationship become quite suggestive of his intentions: “I had to choose whether to continue to try to win her over or to accept her wishes and leave, and in the end I chose the latter. Maybe, I told myself as I drove away, it was a test and I failed” (136). While he endows himself with agency, Changez’s words also indicate that (Am)Erica has ultimately rejected him. The test he has presumably failed, particularly in the post-9/11 world, is his inability to control his Otherness. This moment in the text marks another ideological displacement from America, and a renewed sense of nationalism, that Changez first plays down as a lowly tribalism.

In the post 9/11 world, national identities are reasserted and reified, even in the cosmopolitan offices of Underwood Samson where Changez is suddenly repositioned as an alien, and an Other. Changez notes with displeasure that in the global city, New

York, American flags flutter everywhere after 9/11. This patriotic fervor is a reaction to, and acceptance of, the marking of New York as an American site, rather than a global city, by the terrorists. In this world, Changez can no longer assimilate, even if he wanted to. Instead of assimilating, he has begun sporting a beard – a renewed marker of his nationality. The beard is embodied with symbolism. For Changez, it is a declaration and marker of his Pakistani-ness because he has started to become concerned about the brewing tensions in South Asia. It also marks his departure from the corporate cosmopolitan as American identity formation.

In the charged political context he now lives in, the beard also acquires religious overtones. The combination of his racial features and this apparent religious symbol leads to his interpellation as a Muslim. In a xenophobic moment, he is accosted by a man who presses his face close to Changez,’ utters “a series of unintelligible noises –

“akhala-malakhala,”… or “khalapal-khalapala” and finally brands Changez as the

“Fucking Arab” (116). Changez’ interpellation as a Muslim is replete with irony because he has not demonstrated any Islamic or religious inclinations. Even his budding concerns are for the Pakistani nation, rather than for Islam. The title of the book refers to his reluctance to be either a religious fundamentalist, or subscribe to the economic fundamentalism which Underwood Samson comes to symbolize. Although Changez remains relatively safe in his position, the “rumors” of state and community violence directed at Muslims reaches him. He is unsettled, but reasons that they are “rare cases

of abuse” that affect “the hapless poor, not...Princeton graduates earning eighty thousand dollars a year” (94, 95). These inequalities are ever-present in 1global cities, but they are exacerbated during the national crisis that is 9/11.

Rejected from the fold, Changez begins to question the nature of the “noble” fight that he is supposedly fighting in the interest of global capitalism and maximum efficiency. The threat which permeates the book then is a form of economic fundamentalism in the West which asks its officers to “focus on the fundamentals” – efficiency, profit, and finance. This fundamentalism claims to be amoral and apolitical, but Changez’ changing perspective reveals it be otherwise. A commission in Valparaiso,

Chile, finally disabuses him of his perception of his role in the globalized economy. This commission, undertaken to value a book publishing firm, will result in the shutting down of the trade section of the business. In economic terms, this loss incurring section is a drag on the business, but in another sense, this arm signifies native cultural value which is undermined by a form of economic fundamentalism that is filtered through the narrative lens of the West. Juan-Bautista, the manager of the publishing firm, also evokes the implication of a warrior metaphor that Changez has thus far been hesitant to voice. Juan-Bautista tells Changez about the janissaries, generally Christian boys taken from their families who were converted to Islam, and conscripted into the Ottoman army.

In their heyday, the janissary corps was one of the elite and feared armies in the world, and buttressed the strength of the Ottoman rule. Families often willingly sent their sons to join the janissaries because of the prestige associated with the corps, and the

1 Saskia Sassen writes that the “new urban economy not only strengthens existing inequalities but sets in motion a whole series of new dynamics of inequality” (148). She attributes this polarization largely to the emergence of a service economy.

possibilities of upward mobility it afforded. Juan-Bautista attributes their ferocity and loyalty to their capture and indoctrination at a young age. Having grown up in the

Ottoman empire, and “fought to erase their own civilization,...they had nothing else to turn to” (151). His next proclamation, that Changez could clearly not be a janissary, having been too old when he came to the United States for his education, both pins

Changez’ infatuation with a janissary-like corps, as well as opens the possibility for him to leave the corps.

This metaphor resonates with Changez’s experiences. He finds that he has abandoned his family (and country) to serve instead in an army that has no interest in the welfare of Pakistan. While the units of finance and globalized capital claim to be apolitical, they in fact preserve inequities of power among nations, and within nations. If cosmopolitanism is said to be an opportunity to turn “distant economic interdependence into conscious political co-operation,” Changez’ experiences reveal the failure of this opportunity (Robbins in Cosmopolitics 10). The American empire selects the best soldiers to further its economic interests, while its military side keeps errant nations in check. Once Changez has made this connection, its truth is borne to him in numerous ways. Changez recognizes the cycles of American aid and sanctions to the developing world as proof that “finance was a primary means by which the American empire exercised its power” to preserve its hegemony (157). Returning to the United States from Valparaiso, Changez remarks on how “traditional” the American empire is:

armed sentries manned the check post at which I sought entry; being of a suspect race I was quarantined and subjected to additional inspection; once admitted I hired a charioteer who belonged to a serf class lacking the requisite permission to abide legally and forced therefore to accept work at lower pay; I myself was a form of indentured servant whose right to remain was dependent upon the continued benevolence of my employer (157).

His political awakening following his Othering leads him to a growing political and personal interest in Pakistan, and a renewed sense of nationalism. This change is also a response to the tense rhetoric of war between India and Pakistan in that time period, and Changez’ fear for his family if a war ensues.

Having come to terms with this project, Changez dissociates from it, abandons his commission in Valparaiso, is fired from Underwood Samson, and returns to Pakistan.

Through his actions in Pakistan, Changez’ bend can be distinctly recognized as that of a nationalist. He embraces the nation as the site for his activism which is intended to counter American hegemony. In an often quoted section, Changez remarks to the

American that “As a society, you were unwilling to reflect…You retreated into…assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs…so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums” (168). In a final indemnification, he decides that “America had to be stopped in the interests not only of the rest of humanity, but also in your own” (168). Without valorizing his actions, I want to note that Changez’ return does go against the grain of decades’ old concerns about brain drain in South Asia. His return to Pakistan, which precedes his strategic nationalism, is the beginning of his activism in as much as it rejects the lure of the

American empire. Once in Pakistan, he begins a job as a university lecturer in business and finance, an act that seeks to equalize the economic playing field between the two countries in the long run. Changez disrupts the cyclical production of knowledge and talent in privileged contexts. Moreover, he becomes more than a teacher to his students. He becomes a counselor and mentor to students, advising them on matter ranging from “their papers and their rallies...to matter of the heart...to drug rehabilitation

and family planning to... prisoners’ rights” (180). He also starts mobilizing students politically to agitate for “greater interdependence in Pakistan’s domestic and international affairs” (179). Changez becomes an immensely popular teacher and mobilizer and his time is taken “by meetings with politically minded youths, so much so that I was often forced to stay on until...I had dealt satisfactorily with the curricular and extracurricular demands of those who sought me out” (180). He becomes a figure around whom a motley crowd of protestors organize. For instance, at a demonstration at an event attended by an American ambassador, thousands of people of different affiliations (“communists, capitalists, feminists, religious literalists”) show up (179).

Changez’ strategic nationalistic turn should read in light of Samir Amin’s socio- political justification of a ‘popular nationalism’ that operates on the peripheries of globalization to address the inequities sustained by the mobility of capital. He argues that such a nationalism is a “necessary step toward socialist cosmopolitanism” so that the state can protect the social and labor interests of its interests (Samir Amin in

Cosmopolitics 33). The state’s regulatory influences is needed because there are currently no transnational regularly agencies that can moderate the polarization of wealth and income in the global capitalist economy. Changez’s transnational experiences have already indicated that the liberatory and equalizing promise of a cosmopolitan identity is not always realized. Changez’s activism also becomes a matter of contention though. He receives warnings from the university but the popularity of his courses keeps him from being suspended. Further, the pointed questions that the

American asks him in the concluding pages leads the reader to wonder about the nature of this activism. Changez observes that the demonstrations he has orchestrated

became labeled “anti-American” once they grew to “newsworthy size” (179). Whether this is the attempt of a hegemonic news media to discredit him is unclear. He admits the outbreak of violence which has occurred at demonstrations, but assures the American that he is “a believer in non-violence; the spilling of blood is abhorrent to me, save in self defense” (181). While he acknowledges the involvement of a former student in an assassination attempt, he expresses surprise and denies any involvement in the matter.

Above all, he insists that the students he attracts are not like members of “marauding gangs” – they are “bright, idealistic scholars possessed of both civility and ambition”

(181).

Hamid ultimately leaves the result of this return to strategic nationalism, particularly the response of the empire, ambiguous. The book ends on cliff hanger – the

American may be a CIA assassin sent to assasinate Changez because he poses a threat to the United States with his brand of activism, or Changez may indeed have become a religious fundamentalist and attempted to kill the American. A third possibility includes a non-violent ending to the book in which the gleam Changez observes when the American reaches into his pocket is that of a card holder, rather than a gun, and the novel has a peaceful resolution. The ending then becomes a Rorschach’s test for the reader – open to an interpretation shaped by the reader’s own perspective. In any of the three endings, it is clear that Changez’ activism has struck a chord among Pakistani citizens, and that it has registered (if in a small way) on American consciousness

(whether the American man is a spy or a reporter, he is in Pakistan and interested in

Changez). Both these points reclaim the national space as a site for citizen activism,

particularly to address the specific issue of Muslim Othering and the general social inequalities engendered by and inherent to globalization.

Familiar Conflict and the Nation-State in The Domestic Crusaders

Like The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the play is concerned with presenting Muslim voices in a public sphere that has been dominated by a hegemonic constructs about

Muslims. Wajahat Ali’s project recalls Bayoumi’s work in How Does It Feel To Be A

Problem? They both create nuanced portraits of Muslims and Muslim families. As

Bayoumi observes, there has been sufficient drawing of profiles (or racial profiling), and it is time to draw portraits instead (Bayoumi 12). Ali’s play revolves around three generations of a Muslim family (of Pakistani descent) living in the United States - a grandfather who lived through the India-Pakistan Partition, Pakistani parents who came to the United States as a young couple, and three adult children born and raised in the

United States. The play is set in a post-9/11 moment and the hegemonic voice coming through the television set, reporting on the ‘war on terror,’ contextualizes the lives of the characters. However, as in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, all other voices, whether hegemonic or minority, are filtered through and reported by the main characters. The domestic staging of the play, with all the acts set inside the family home, anticipates the national stage on which the young activists act. In The Domestic Crusaders, the protagonists make the nation a site of activism as a way of claiming their rights in the

United States and reaffirming their belonging and American citizenship. In my analysis of political consciousness and Muslim youth activism in the play, I will focus closely on the implications of the family drama, particularly the vertical reading of intergenerational conflict which can be subverted in the service of the empire.

The play’s focus on the family unit is deliberate. In a NBC interview, playwright

Wajahat Ali called the play a “universal family story ... told in the culturally specific voice” of Muslim Americans (NBC Interview). In the same interview, the interviewer notes that the play has been “described as a family drama” and calls it a “study in generational difference” (NBC Interview). The protagonists in the play undermine prevalent stereotypes of Muslims in American society by occupying multiple and often contradictory subject positions. The play’s opening exchange between the immigrant mother, Khulsoom, and her American raised daughter, Fatima, reveals the nuancing that Wajahat Ali attempts. The play opens with the adhan, the call to prayer, playing on the radio as Khulsoom cooks in the kitchen. Having established this religious marker,

Khulsoom’s actions then deconstruct the image of the radical Muslim. She completes a short five second prayer while sitting in a chair, and then takes off the already loose hijab on her head so that it hangs on her shoulders like a scarf. Changing the radio channel, she puts on a station broadcasting Tom Jones. Khulsoom’s handling of the hijab challenges what Spivak has identified as a recurring imperial trope: “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak 93). This rhetoric was used by the

United States to justify the wars in the Middle East, particularly in Afghanistan, where the American ‘intervention’ was justified on humanitarian grounds. Khulsoom’s example shows that the Western rhetoric of the oppression of Muslim women is simplistic.

Women do choose to wear the hijab, and are not always castigated for removing it.

Later in the play, when Fatima continues to wear her hijab at home, her father, Salman, encourages her to remove it so he can admire his daughter’s hair.

Indeed, if adherence to religious precepts is weighed in the play, Fatima, the young American law student, emerges as the most religious in the family. Despite her father’s exhortations, she keeps the hijab on to keep her modesty. The play though, does not allow the viewer to construct the binary of the liberal mother and the extremist daughter either, or generally, as Sal, the oldest son, puts it, “the battle of the hijabi and the non-hijabi” (7). In the opening scene, Khulsoom and Fatima play out dynamic oppositions and positions with respect to ‘modernity’ in an intergenerational conflict.

Khulsoom might show less adherence to religious principles, but she espouses other values that could be considered stereotypical for a South Asian mother - she complains about Fatima’s lack of training in housework, and her failure to attract marriage proposals. Fatima immediately criticizes this position as one which renders women subservient to their husband, and places women in the kitchen and the domestic household. Fatima is an outspoken feminist who is critical of the typecast daughter-in- law: traditional, light-skinned, good looking, and able to cook. Fatima is also critical of the “insincere, plastic nonsense” of young Muslims who attend prayers once a week, and affect piety and modesty at Pakistani family parties (31). The intergenerational family conflict represents the universal aspect of the play (which Ali has referred to), while the causes vary depending on specific cultural and family concerns. As a devout

Muslim who believes there is “no color barrier” in religion, she is comfortable breaking traditional and familial norms by dating a black Muslim (7). Fatima is also one of the two civic activists in the play. She is one of the muhajjabahs, Muslim sisters, who are protesting American imperialism nationally and in the Middle East (10). Given her transnational sensibilities, she is also critical of her older brother, Salahuddin, who

embraces the capitalist system. Sal is not unlike an early version of Changez, who believes that finance and capitalism hold the key to resolving social inequities. Like

Changez, he also attempts to date outside his religion. One of the recurrent peer conflicts in the play occurs between Sal and Fatima over Fatima’s belief that Sal is actually contributing to furthering the American empire. This is the kind of polyphony of

Muslim characters, responses, and activisms which Scanlan and Morey noted as being missing from the genre of the terrorist novel.

Political dialogue and arguments about policies and responses are sustained throughout the play. Even more than The Reluctant Fundamentalist, this play traces different responses and activisms which are activated as a result of Othering. The play enables both a horizontal and vertical reading of character positions. All three generations have been exposed to upheavals in which Muslims were negatively affected, and attempted to resolve the situations differently. Hakim, the grandfather, lived through the India-Pakistan Partition and reacted with violence to avenge the death of his friends. I will return to his example towards the end of this chapter. The parents, new immigrants to the United States, carved a space in the local American community while drawing minimal attention to themselves. Salman, the father, narrates the foundational role he and other Muslims played in gathering the Muslims in the area and creating the first communal space in which Muslims could gather and pray. Their actions crafted a Muslim community which supports the new immigrants, and introduces hybridity into the national American fabric. Salman’s struggles to establish this community leave him embittered when he re-experiences Othering in the post-9/11 society. More than the other characters, he expresses his frustration and disgust at the

biased media commentary which tells the American public: “Blame Islam. Blame

Muslims. Blame immigrants for everything….Right—another Amreekan general telling me why the Muslim world hates us” (23). The pronominal choices in this last line reflect his frought position because he is both Muslim as well as a part of the ‘us,’ the

Americans. Salman has come to believe that his children must capitalize on his hard earned success by renewing it through financial stability and community recognition

(especially among other Pakistani Muslims).

This stance creates intergenerational conflict in the family. A major crisis point in the play occurs when Ghafur, the youngest son, unexpectedly announces to his family that he has decided to pursue an education in history, with a specialization in Middle

East, Islam, and Arabic, instead of medicine. He wants to educate the community about

Islam, and is willing to teach at any level of school or college that he can access. Before

Ghafur announces his decision, he narrates an incident of racial profiling that has become very common since 9/11. As he is waiting to board a flight home, he becomes intensely aware of his own subjectivity and the gaze of the hegemonic institution on him as a man “wearing sandals, with a grizzly beard, with my prayer cap on, a Sports

Illustrated in my back pocket and a new paperback of Jihad and Terrorism” (40). These are all markers that have been made into aberrations at an airport since 9/11. He recalls incidents when South Asian men were asked to deplane because they “endanger and disturb the psychological and mental comfort of the airline passengers” (39).

Predictably, he is pulled aside at the last minute for an extra screening, which is now coded as “standard procedure” (40). The institutional gaze further exposes him for judgement from the other passengers. He is searched in front of them, and they “stroll

on by, witnessing the Muslim-mammal zoo exhibit” (40). The ritual has been normalized, and deemed necessary because of the Othering of Muslims. Specifically, Ghafur talks about the misinformation that has been fed to the American public and which dives their paranoia.

The domestic intergenerational conflict which Ghafur’s announcement sparks represents the problematic tendency of displacement which allows the empire to act by proxy (of the family) to nullify its critics. As Lisa Lowe has noted, the “master narratives of generational conflict and filial relation” have been much applied in reading early Asian

American literature (Lowe). Lowe also notes that such a reading is problematic because it “displaces social differences into privatized familial opposition,” and in essence, the critique of oppressive social conditions shifts to a critique of family members (Lowe).

Unfortunately, in The Domestic Crusaders, this dynamic is not simply the result of critics trying to impose their reading on the text. As the name of the play suggests, the play is set up to focus on the family, and the intergenerational family dynamics at the centre of the play invites a reading of generational differences. While The Reluctant

Fundamentalist leaves the reaction of the empire ambiguous because of its opaque conclusion, The Domestic Crusaders enables the hegemonic voice of the empire to strike through the intergenerational conflict.

The displacement of critique from national and social formations to the family, that

Lowe warns, can be seen occurring in the reactions to Ghafur’s announcement.

Khulsoom and Salman’s castigation of Ghafur can be read in light of their own struggles to establish themselves as new immigrants in an American community. Certainly, a part of their reaction may be attributed to the valorization of fields such as medicine, and

engineering by Asian American immigrant parents because of cultural norms. Ghafur’s decision is thus seen as a blow to his parents’ reputation. However, his parents are also concerned that Ghafur has not taken into account their decades long struggle, as

Muslims and new immigrants, to achieve a certain class and community standard in the

United States. For Salman, this struggle is ongoing: he reveals to his wife that despite his years of service and good work in his engineering firm, he has been denied a promotion. The promotion is instead given to another Muslim who is perceived as more authentic because of physical markers such as a beard, and hence a more persuasive company representative to travel to the Middle East. The racialized decision that his supervisor makes allows the company to commercialize authenticity to its own benefit, and drive a wedge in Muslim solidarity. Salman’s disappointment conceals a sharp critique of American society, and its ability to alternatively exoticize or demonize the

Other. On the one hand, Salman and his family are marked as Muslims, and suffer from stereotyping in the post-9/11 society, and at the same time, are seen as being insufficiently authentic in certain contexts. The decision to award the promotion also challenges the image of America as a meritocratic society.

However, this critique is buried under Salman’s heated conflict with his son, which culminates in a polarizing and physical altercation: Salman eventually loses his temper and slaps Ghafur. Sal jumps in and holds his father back, further angering the latter and driving a wedge in their already tense relationship. The altercation exacerbates generational differences and lines. It is the altercation, rather than Salman’s internal turmoil about Ghafur’s decision, which becomes foregrounded. Salman’s experiences at work resonate with the experiences his children have had, but the play denies them the

possibility of using these common experiences to form intergenerational solidarity.

Salman reveals his disappointment in a private conversation to Khulsoom, and explicitly forbids her from sharing it with anyone else in the family.

This kind of vertical reading emblematizes precisely the displacement that Lowe identified. Although the play does not allow an overt hegemonic voice to speak against

Ghafur and Fatima’s civic activism, its insidious reach through the family dynamics fractures solidarity and thwarts mobilizing. The family, symbolic of the Muslim community, fails to arrive at a consensus about how to respond to its Othering, and worse, imposes a secondary alienation on its members. Such a reading of the intergenerational conflict undermines the playwright’s mission to introduce a ‘typical’

Muslim family to American society because it simultaneously allows the family unit to be co-opted into the imperial discourse. The vertical, intergenerational model of reading can not be completely abandoned in The Domestic Crusaders, but its reductive effects may be ameliorated if the play is also subjected, as Lowe proposes, to a horizontal reading of conflicts and alliances between peers. If Ali’s family focused play is susceptible to co-option, it also pulls off a wild card climax that disrupts the status quo of generational allegiance to certain forms of activism. In the last act of the play, titled “The

History of the Masala Chai,” Hakim, the grandfather, reveals his reactionary acts as a young man. His story caps the dramatic events of the day, which have included

Ghafur’s announcement to his family, and Salman’s news to his wife.

Hakim’s story complicates any reading of the play. In a sense, his story constitutes a return of history to haunt the present. Hakim’s story, briefly, covers his experiences as a young man during Partition. Angered that the Hindu killers of his Muslim friends are

not being brought to justice, he joins a group of Muslims who “made a pact to punish those who killed our people and got away with it” (99). In the absence of a state sanctioned justice, private feelings and justice take over. Although Hakim does not paint himself as a religious fundamentalist, a violent nationalist, or as an instigator of violence, he admits to his family that “after the first [murder], the rest become routine,” implying that he killed a number of men (99). At the end of the story, Hakim concurs that “one day [I would] have to answer for the blood I’d spilled” to Allah, and laments the memories and screams that he has had to live it (101). However, he also asks his grandchildren not to judge him too harshly, and to consider the context that he acted in.

Hakim’s revelation intervenes in the play at several levels. On one level, he appears to have polarized the family even further as some characters condemn him unequivocally while others try to defend him. However, their reactions also make possible the heretofore unrealized potential for intergenerational Muslim solidarity.

Fatima and Ghafur are aghast and together, condemn the use of violence. Given her own emphasis of peaceful protests, Fatima feels betrayed by her grandfather. Both Sal, and Salman, who have been on opposing sides of each other that day, are, however, aligned in some sympathy for Hakim, and Sal defends Hakim from Fatima’s accusations. More importantly, Hakim’s reactionary violence provides a register against which Fatima and Ghafur’s activism can be read. Sal and Salman’s defense of the old man are a critique of the activism proposed by Fatima and Ghafur. Activism that may also be proposed by a liberal democracy: forgiveness, diplomacy, and the justice system (legislative or religious law). Sal, in particular, draws Fatima’s attention to the corruption in the Partition era justice system, and asks her to place herself in her

grandfather’s situation before judging him. His challenge is not altogether alien in the post-9/11 context in which the American state did violate civil rights. The activism proposed by Fatima and Ghafur requires a basic trust that the state, and perhaps more importantly, its citizens, will come to respect their voice and act in redressal. Since their activism is incipient, this question can not be adequately answered in this chapter, but it does raise important concerns about the effectiveness of their activism. I will also take up this question in the next chapter when both reactionary violence and civic activism is presented as a response to the Othering of Muslims.

For the state, Hakim presents the arrival of the terrorist. Fatima’s interrogation reflects the sentiments of Americans who find the terrorists’ motivations and actions incomprehensible, (a confusion that was strongly reflected in early news reports about the attacks), and want to make sense of 9/11 by getting inside the head of the ‘terrorist.’

Why would he resort to violence? How does he feel? Does he experience guilt or regret? And finally, as Fatima puts it, “after all these years, when you look back, would you have done anything differently? I mean, after all that death and chaos?” (103). In a hegemonic discourse of respectability and appropriateness, which becomes more apparent in the Bollywood films in the next chapter, Fatima and Ghafur are now the desirable Muslims from the state’s perspective. If, as Stephen Chan claims (in analyzing characters like Changez from The Reluctant Fundamentalist,) the Islamic hero has become reduced to a domesticated Other who is too excessively involved in clever repartees and “negotiation, discourse, politesse, and protocol” to pose a real challenge to the state, then Hakim presents a significant challenge because he refuses to play by the rules (Chan 830). Ali, however, refuses to either completely praise or condemn

Hakim. The different reactions of the family engender a simultaneous distancing of

Hakim, the violent actor, and a rehabilitation of Hakim, the grandfather, now an old man.

The actions of the young Hakim draw censure from his family, and it is made clear in the play’s dialogue that even when his loved ones defend him, they don’t stand for his brand of violence. Hakim’s Othering in this familial discourse is offset by a rehabilitation which occurs when Hakim, as a grandfather, is positioned in a web of familial relations.

In this role, Hakim has the role of mediating the conflicts that have occurred during the day between the various family members. Moreover, the older man becomes an anachronistic segment of the Muslim Pakistani-American population, more Pakistani than American.

Problematically, Hakim’s story exposes an alignment between Fatima and Ghafur, as activists, and the American state, which they are critical of. Their subject position regarding Hakim’s acts represent the stance of the state. This potential co-optation of their subjectivity, and activism, is thwarted if we read Fatima and Ghafur’s actions as that of citizen-activists. They both claim the national space as the site of activism, and intend to work within the framework of the American state, institutions, and culture, regardless of the potential for co-optation. Fatima’s renunciation of her grandfather’s violence, for instance, is voiced, both as a rejection of his violence, as well as the heritage he stands for. When Hakim asks her to “make peace with your history,” she retorts with: “This is not my history. My history is just being an American Muslim who is in law school, and the worst thing I’ve ever done is to be arrested for protesting and standing up for what I believe in” (103). Despite her critique of America, she ultimately locates herself as an American, interested in agitating in the national space. The trauma

of 9/11, for her, is a lived experience, while the metaphor of Partition is ultimately alien. I read Fatima and Ghafur’s rejection of a transnational heritage as a way of claiming their rights in the American state.

To recap, briefly, Rajini Srikanth, in The World Next Door: South Asian American

Literature and the Idea of America, observes that after 9/11, it was made “starkly clear to Asian Americans [and Arab Americans] that their membership within the United

States is a tenuous affair” (54). In some cases, the groups did not choose a transnational allegiance at all, but were “forcibly transnationed” (Kandice Chuh in The

World Next Door 54). Following the attacks, transnationality was used by the state as a mechanism to challenge immigrants’ belonging. Policies such as the special registration were implemented because of the belief that immigrants with transnational ties must have split loyalties, and needed to be monitored by the state for signs of disloyalty to its jingoistic nationalism. Fatima and Ghafur, in particular, may indeed be participating in the national discourse defined by the state’s terms, but their activism constitutes a refusal to concede their human and legal rights in the nation. Moreover, the siblings rejection of a transnational history does not necessarily imply a rejection of everyday practices that may be considered transnational, or abandoning a transnational consciousness. They both remain interested in furthering the hybridity of the American social fabric through their current and future work, but this activism is firmly rooted in a national, rather than a transnational context.

CHAPTER 3 THE ACTIVIST AND THE TERRORIST: REIMAGINING THE NATION-STATE IN MY NAME IS KHAN AND NEW YORK

Bollywood, the largest industry of popular film in India, has responded to globalization by expanding its cinematic imagination, processes of production, and audience. The most visible aspect of this global imaginary, although not typical of a vast industry, is an elite cosmopolitanism that makes territorial borders permeable. Films are shot in foreign locales that would appeal to a home audience captivated by globe- trotting fantasies, the diaspora and temporary migrant in Western or Westernized countries becomes a trope for films even as films travel in transnational circuits, and actors in the industry are invited abroad for music shows, performances, and award ceremonies. Films like My Name is Khan and New York are located in this cosmopolitan ethic but underscore an unsavory side of transnational migration, by exposing the problematic cultural politics which structure the lives of Indian im/migrants, specifically

Indian Muslims in a post-9/11 United States. The films’ locatedness in the United States can also be seen as subversive, because it enables a simultaneous, albeit displaced, critique of India. Although the films are located in the American context, and explore the complexities of South Asian Muslim life after 9/11 in the United States, the films are also speaking to India’s socio-political situation regarding Muslims. Both films emphasize the subaltern perspective, an important foregrounding given the marginalization and demonization of Muslims in contemporary Hollywood and Bollywood films.

As I have already noted in the Introduction, both films run counter to the historical marginalization of Muslims in Hollywood and Bollywood films, and I want to emphasize this aspect, although I argue that the film’s may be co-opted by the state’s imperial discourse. Both films articulate normative views on citizenship and belonging. By

normative, I mean that markers and codes are established for a ‘good’ minority citizen, as defined by a hegemonic nation-state, and citizens coded as ‘bad’ are punished. More than The Domestic Crusaders and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, these films are invested in furthering the good/bad Muslim dichotomy on hegemonic terms within the

1American empire. Certainly, as popular culture products, these films are open to being co-opted within the state’s discourse. However, I want to recognize this particular tendency without losing focus of the intervention staged by both films in the decades’ long marginalization of Muslims on screen. In essence, I propose locating the normative structures in the film in the socio-political context within which the film operates, and reading its normative acts against the grain. In keeping with the theme of my project, I explore how these films produce minority nationalism via civic activism. By becoming activists, South Asian Muslim subjects stake a claim to the national space from which they have been evicted. Activism in this case, is a normative act, in the sense that it suggests that an alliance with the regulatory neoliberal state is essential for minority rights, and posits the nation-state as a site of belonging. Although they are normative, these acts can also be productive for Muslim subjects because they introduce alterity in the nation’s public spaces and its cultural and legal memory.

Contrary to the normative act of civic activism, the threat of radicalism and terrorism also presents a counter possibility in the agitation for minority rights. I believe, as Sumita Chakravarty does, that a counternormative reading of the terrorist Muslim citizen allows terrorism to be read as a minority nationalism that draws attention to problems in the nation-state, in this case, in the United States, and by proxy, in India

1 Given their production in India, both films are also “pre-textualized” in the Indian socio-political context, and advise Muslims in India on appropriate behavior too (Vijay Mishra 268).

(242). In relation to her study of three Mani Ratnam terrorist films (Roja, Bombay, and

Dil Se), she observes that films about terrorism reveal a “third stage of nationalism…with no clear moral or political center, and with goals ranging from the ultrachauvinistic to the more traditional strivings for a designated nation-space” (233).

She later concludes her analysis by noting that terrorism “is also a means of interrogation of national ideals gone awry, and of evoking the faces and voices of the estranged who must be brought back into the cultural mainstream” (242). Thus, the films “suggest that the nation is problematic if not compromised and needs to be rethought” (242). Although Fredric Jameson does not explicitly frame terrorism in a national context, he does conceive of religion as a form of politics, and argues that religious fundamentalism can be construed as a “political option, which is embraced when other political options have been shut down” (Jameson 59). Along the lines of

Chakravarty and Jameson, terrorism can then be read as an excess, which threatens hegemonic conceptualizing of the nation-state, nationalism, and citizenship.

Fundamentalism or radicalism, as a political act, also enables the conceptualizing of transnational consciousness. Even when the act occurs within the confines of a territorial state, its origins and implications are global, and it is driven by this very understanding that borders are porous and liminal. For my project, it is important to place a radical act of nationalism within a transnational network because the subjects engaging in these acts have cross-cultural linkages.

These cross cultural and transnational linkages are also important given the para-context of the films production and reception. Both films were major productions, and My Name is Khan particularly enjoyed substantial commercial success, especially

outside India. My Name is Khan, was released in 2010 and involved three popular

Bollywood figures – the director, Karan Kohar, and the actors Shah Rukh Khan and

Kajol. The trio has produced successful films in the past, and the film was highly anticipated for reuniting Khan and Kajol, a popular lead pairing. The film was shot in Los

Angeles, San Francisco, and several locations in India. In uncanny echoes of the film,

Khan was also the center of controversies in a different regard. In 2010, after he expressed regret that Pakistani players had not been included in that year’s Indian

Premier League, an international cricket series held in India, Hindu nationalists threated violence if My Name is Khan was released in theatres. Khan was called insensitive and said to have “insulted Mumbai, given the 2008 terror attack here by militants trained in

Pakistan” (Yardley). Khan’s remarks were painted as unpatriotic and the nationalists raised questions about his national loyalties. Later, more controversies surrounded his trips to the United States for shooting and promoting the film when he was selected for extra screening due to his racial features and name. This racially charged incident sparked a furore in India when it was reported by the Indian media.

These incidents have uncanny parallels with the film, in which Rizwan (the character played by Khan) is pulled aside for extra screening at an airport due to his features. The film installs 9/11 as a split in the lives of South Asian Muslims living in the

U.S, so that the airport screening could only occur in the ‘post’ moment of paranoia. The film is narrated in retrospect by Rizwan, and begins in India with a brief introduction to the childhood of Rizwan Khan, who lives in Mumbai with his mother and a younger brother. Rizwan has Asperger Syndrome, and this is the basis for the early alienation he faces. Even when he moves to the U.S., as an adult sponsored for American citizenship

by his successful brother, religion or race are not linked to the misunderstandings which affect Rizwan’s life. Rather, his undiagnosed Asperger’s leaves people unsure how interact with him, particularly when he becomes a salesman for beauty products and is forced to interact with people. This early America is a racial and religious utopia in which even inter-religious marriage can be a possibility. (This is a possibility which the film forecloses for India – early in the film, a short scene depicts religious strife in the community in which Rizwan lives.) During one of Rizwan’s professional trips, he falls in love with Mandira, a much loved hair dresser, and a single mother with a young son,

Sameer. Although Mandira’s citizenship status is not explicitly stated, it is implied that she has been in the United States for a long time, after she was abandoned by her first husband. Just prior to the 9/11 attacks, Mandira and Rizwan wed, and move to a small

(fictional) town called Banville where Mandira opens her own hair salon. The melodramatic romance turns into a tragedy when 9/11 unfolds. In the suddenly changed political climate Mandira’s salon loses its clientele because it has a Muslim name, and finally, in a racially charged episode, the young Sameer is killed by a white gang of school bullies who believe he is Muslim because of his racial features and last name. In this last instance, the film plays lives up to its Bollywood tag and exploits the pathos of the context fully. Traumatized by Sameer’s death, Mandira holds Rizwan accountable and in a fit of grief, asks him to leave her and not return till he has given the following message to the President of the United States: My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist. Rizwan believes that Mandira speaks earnestly, and the plot, now narrated in chronological order, follows Rizwan’s Odyssean journey to reach the President.

Of the two films, My Name is Khan is more explicitly invested in deconstructing the negative stereotypes of Muslims set up after 9/11. While New York introduces a domestic Muslim terrorist, it concludes on a highly normative note which supports hegemonic ideology. The film was released in 2009, and stars several prominent

Bollywood actors. John Abraham and Katrina Kaif play the roles of the lead Indian-

Americans, Samir and Maya, college students who become friends with Omar (played by Neil Mukesh), a young Indian student newly arrived from India. Their close friendship unravels after 9/11 as Maya and Samir are drawn together in a romantic relationship to

Omar’s dismay. This portion of the story is recollected in flashbacks by Omar, now held for interrogation by the FBI after arms are discovered in a cab he owns. During his interrogation, he comes to the conclusion that the arms were planted by the FBI so that he could be forced to re-establish a relationship with Maya and Samir (who are now married, and have a son), and spy on Samir, now believed to be a terrorist. Frightened by the prospect of being held without trail, Omar agrees to collude with FBI agent,

Roshan, (played by Irrfan Khan) another Muslim American of South Asian descent, in uncovering the truth. During his stay with Samir and Maya, Omar learns that Samir spent a lengthy time in detention after 9/11 and Samir’s experiences have inspired

Maya to become an activist. She now works with other Muslims who were held without evidence of guilt to record their experiences which can then be used in a law suit against the state. Omar soon discovers that the FBI was right about Samir’s radical leanings. Traumatized by his detention, he has cultivated a network of domestic terrorists who plan to detonate a bomb in the FBI building. The climax of the film involves a tense standoff as Omar and Maya attempt to convince Samir to call off his

plans, as he stands poised to trigger the bombs and concludes with Samir and Maya’s death by sniper fire.

Both films were well received in India and were screened at several international film festivals. My Name is Khan, for instance, was selected for an official screening at the 60th Berlin Film Festival and eventually released in over 20 countries. It performed very well at the box office internationally, especially in the first 7-10 days after release.

In the Middle East and countries as wide ranging as South Africa and Denmark, the film was reputed to have become the most successful Bollywood film in the first week of release (Business of Cinema). In India, the film is one of the top ten high grossing

Bollywood films of all time (Box Office India). Although New York was not as commercially successful as My Name is Khan, and was released in fewer international theatres, it was the first commercial Bollywood film to address the issue of Muslim

Othering in the post-9/11 world. The transnational networks that the films travelled in (in terms of production in India, as well as reception abroad) reflects international awareness about Muslim Othering in the United States.

The Origin of the Terrorist Citizen after 9/11

In an article titled “The Citizen and the Terrorist,” Leti Volpp argues that 9/11 consolidated a “racialization wherein members of this group [people who appear to be

Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim] are identified as terrorists, and are disindentified as citizens” (1576). This disidentification is initiated by public policy measures such as detentions, special registration, and interviews, which indicate that citizenship does not confer civil rights. Volpp argues that these groups are not, in fact, considered citizens at all, if citizenship is considered as a form of identity that is interpellated (1592). By way of

Althusser, Volpp holds that since “individuals are “always-already subjects” of

ideology…certain individuals and communities are positioned as objects of exclusion” against whom other citizens define their affiliation to the nation-state (Althusser in

Volpp, 1593). After 9/11, American identity was defined against these individuals,

Muslims, Arabs, and those who resembled these groups. These groups came under suspicion for having divided loyalties.

Volpp’s theorizing both justifies and explains how Othering was used as a tool to disidentify Muslim Americans from their national identify. Along similar lines, Kandace

Chuh identifies a second strategy of disidentification: transnationalism. Chuh writes that during World War II, the foregrounding of Japanese immigrants’ transnational linkages served to deemphasize their national belonging (Chuh in World Next Door 54). Again, such a strategy casts aspersions on the loyalty and belonging of citizens, and in the case of Japanese Americans, it helped justify internment. Volpp and Chuh’s work is important because it indicates that the hegemonic state plays an active role in producing and naturalizing the citizen as terrorist type, so that specific groups can then be regulated and brought under state control. One of the consequences of this naturalizing is the 2reproduction of that type in society such that citizens begin to eventually enforce it on the suspected minorities too.

The Introduction had already documented the various measures which encouraged racial profiling and helped consolidate the view of Muslims as terrorists.

Among other measures, Arabs, Muslims or citizens of specific Muslim countries were detained, required to register in national databases, and interviewed (Immigration Policy

Center 3). Muslim Americans too were affected by the atmosphere of suspicion.

2 Hate crimes against Muslim Americans showed a dramatic increase after 9/11.

Numerous incidents report men who were racially typed as Muslim being asked to deplane from a flight because passengers and crew were suspicious of the men. These kinds of Othering, and disidentifications, are highlighted in My Name is Khan and New

York.

In the post-9/11 milieu, a gendered and racialized Othering occurs so that

Rizwan (My Name is Khan) and Omar and Sameer (New York) become interpellated as

Muslims. This is a change that occurs post-9/11. Moreover, a key part of the My Name

Is Khan plot revolves around misrecognition, when South Asians are taken for Muslims and suffer the effects of this association. The Othering and misrecognition has fatal consequences in the context of these movies in a way that doesn’t occur in The

Reluctant Fundamentalist or The Domestic Crusaders. In My Name Is Khan, the community turns a suspicious eye on the Khan family immediately after 9/11, at a prayer ceremony for the victims of the attacks. When Rizwan Khan begins praying in

Arabic in the white, Christian dominated ceremony, the atmosphere turns hostile. The community at the service looks surprised when Rizwan attempts to donate a substantial sum to a fund set up for those affected by the attacks and Mandira has to interject and explain zakat, one of the pillars of Islam. The Khans’ lives (Mandira takes Rizwan’s last name) are affected further though. In the new socio-political climate, Mandira’s salon is forced to close because it has a Muslim name and the community is unwilling to give it business. Then, in a racially charged episode, Mandira’s young son from a previous marriage is killed by a white gang of school bullies. The young boy has been taunted before by the bullies who believe that he is Muslim because of his racial features and last name. When he finally responds to their bullying, he is physically abused and

succumbs to his injuries. The child’s death causes Mandira and Rizwan’s marriage to fall apart as Mandira blames Rizwan for her son’s death.

This high watermark in the film is emotionally saturated, not an 3unusual characteristic of a Bollywood film to evoke empathy and alignment with the suffering of protagonists. The viewer is rendered a helpless spectator and witness to the child’s abuse as well as the grief of his mother and adoptive father. The child’s death may also be read in light of the American empire’s anxiety of its Muslim and South Asian subjects. If children stand for the future of a community, then this death symbolizes the ultimate threat the empire can make to the community, an end to lineage and future.

Extending this line of reasoning, the child’s death should properly be treated as a murder, enacted at the hands of other children, but instigated and supported by a violent empire. I will return to this matter of the empire’s interest in children’s bodies later in my analysis of New York’s conclusion.

In New York too, the Othering takes a violent form that leaves physical and mental traumas on the victim’s body. The film is particularly focused on the judiciary and law enforcement arms of the government. The film opens with the arrest of Omar, who is now a taxi driver in New York, a few years after 9/11. During his interrogation by

Roshan, a Muslim American FBI agent, Omar comes to the conclusion that the FBI had planted the weapons in his taxi so they could arrest him on the charge of illegal weapons possession. He is summarily rejected access to a lawyer, held in detention, and threatened by Roshan with indeterminate detention in an unknown location. These extra-legal actions, while not entirely grounded in reality, are given some credence by

3 Again, this deployment of a filmic style common to Bollywood indicates that these films are working within conventional structures and narratives.

the experience of detainees following the passage of the PATRIOT Act. The FBI, given form by Roshan and his white supervisor, want Omar to re-establish contact with Maya and Sameer so he can spy on Samir, now suspected of terrorism related activities.

Roshan justifies his work with the FBI as an attempt to work within a government structure to change the government policies and attitude towards Muslims. He also expresses his disgust of Muslims who use the Quran to promote terrorism, and believes

Samir to be one of these Muslims. Omar, coerced by the possibility of detention and lured by the opportunity to clear Samir’s name, agrees with Roshan’s plan.

During his stay with Maya and Samir, now married and parents to a young son, he discovers that Samir has experienced the effects of Othering too. In the tense months after 9/11, Samir, still a college student, is arrested while he is waiting to board a flight at an American airport, and tortured and detained for nine months. His arrest is based on inconsequential evidence – high-resolution photos of key NYC buildings taken as a part of an Architecture class are construed as evidence of his terrorist leanings.

The film depicts an extended sequence of the various forms of violence and degradations that Samir experiences – including, but not limited to, naked confinement to a cold and small boxed cell, acoustic and visual torture, and humiliation by prison guards who force him to wear a urine saturated burlap sack on his face. Panning camera shots also show that other South Asian men are locked into nearby cells and may have been similarly tortured. Although he is an American citizen, he is not accorded his legal rights and finally released due to inconclusive evidence. Although the film dramatizes Samir’s confinement, some of the conditions were borne out on mainland detention facilities. For instance, a Department of Justice report found that

some detainees were denied legal rights, and there were instances of abuse at these facilities (5).After his release, Samir shows symptoms of PTSD and is unable to handle everyday life situations. He also has a hard time finding a job, both due to his racial features as well as the extended detention which makes potential employees suspicious.

Claiming the Nation

The protagonists in these films take different paths in response to Othering, but three trends emerge in their responses: civic activism, working through state institutions, and radicalism. The first is characterized by efforts to seek legal recourse against or after Othering, volunteer work in other minority communities, and spreading awareness about Muslim life after 9/11. The second, which crops up mainly in New York, involves working through state institutions to effect change. In New York, this response is embodied by Roshan, a South Asian American FBI agent, and Omar, who agrees to become a government informant. The last takes the form of violent anti-systemic actions and accepts the appellation of ‘terrorism.’ If these films are examined solely for normativity, then the dichotomized and hegemonic conceptions of good and bad citizen behaviours will be foregrounded at this point. In such a reading, My Name is Khan emerges as highly normative film because it not only denounces violent reactionary work, but also presents a socially acceptable civic alternative instead. Such a reading also presumes that activism is necessarily 4implicated in the hegemonic structure of the state and ultimately fails to affect and alter that structure. While such a critique should

4 Such a reading is ironic given that Muslim activists were often construed as terrorists or anti-American by the state.

not be discounted, it should also not foreclose the possibility that civic activism and working within the neo-liberal state can impact the system.

Moreover, a critique of normativity assumes a certain privilege which may not be available to minorities who are already on the margins of society. For instance, undocumented Muslim or Arab immigrants were one of the most vulnerable groups after

9/11 and the implementation of several policies stemming from the PATRIOT Act

(Immigration Policy Center 8, 18). Many of these immigrants were eventually deported on non-terrorism related charges. Charging such groups with desiring or upholding normative structures of citizenship and belonging does not account for their vulnerable position. Finally, it is important to take into account that in the light of historical marginalization and demonization of Muslims in cinema, (and the impact of these depictions on social prejudice), these portrayals of good, albeit normative, Muslim citizens is a socially important turn. In this section of the chapter, I examine the three responses I outlined above and discuss how they constitute a minority nationalism. I argue that all three responses are a way of claiming the national space, and expressing belonging to the nation-state which has Othered them. By staking such a claim, the subaltern subject refuses to cede his or her belonging and citizenship. My analysis examines how these nationalistic impulses might be co-opted by the state as well as their potential to challenge the empire.

Although certain forms of nationalism have been roundly criticized, there has been a resurgence in studying models of contemporary nationalisms in light of new nationalist movements (Chakravarty 242, Lazarus 68). Lazarus observes that this resurgence is often viewed with dismay as a condition that “only ever results in the

violent intensification of already existing social divisions” (68). Calling such a view

“disingenuous,” he notes that it pits Western nationalism as a completed project with

“benign effects: modernizing, unifying, democratizing,” while nationalisms in the East or

South are “categorized under the rubrics of atavism, anarchy, irrationality, and power- mongering” and finally as threats to the “established social order of the West” (69). In his later recuperation of Fanon, he speaks of the potential of a “nationalist internationalism” that joins the national liberation struggle to a wider struggle for socialism (79, 242). Other scholars have similarly spoken of the possibilities engendered by strategic nationalism and by minority nationalism in the “assertion of political and civil, not to say human, rights, of democracy and of cultural expression and pluralism” (Watson 4). The nationalism embodied in these films is a minority nationalism, but without any political aspirations to a separate nation-state.

Despite its racialized politics, the nation space also appears to be conducive to fostering solidarity and alliances between minorities. Pheng Cheah, for instance, questions whether there is a basis for solidarity and consciousness in cosmopolitanism, on the other hand. For such solidarity to come into being, subjects must first locate some “mass-based global loyalty” that is not linked to race, religion, nationality, or other facets of identity. Cheah further asks whether such a popular global consciousness, even if it exists, can be “sufficiently institutionalized to become a feasible political alternative to the nation-state form” (Inhuman Conditions 41). While this is a broad project, this concluding section of my project indicates that the capacity of the nation space to foster dialogue and consciousness should not be underestimated. The protagonists in these works are nationalists in the sense that they voluntarily express a

specific national identity, and assert their human rights and state granted rights as minorities who were denied certain rights by the hegemonic majority. These films disrupt, too, the idea that nationalism in the Western context is a finished project, and indicate that racial and ethnic groups can form transnational linkages within the scope of their nationalist project (in the sense that these films address and align the socio- political goals of Muslims living in India and the United States). In the next few pages, I discuss how the protagonists of these films take up different forms of activism to express their national belonging.

Given the legal underpinning of the state’s racial profiling (via the PATRIOT Act), it is not surprising that judicial activism has drawn so many activists and scholars.

Judicial activists and scholars were particularly critical of what was perceived as the violation of human rights, and suspension of civil rights as result of various state actions. Although these policies were not as brazen as those which coerced Japanese-

American internees to renounce their citizenship, they do force the acknowledgement that not all citizens, or even individuals, have the same rights under the nation-state.

Given these violations of state and international law, community organizations, activists, and lawyers were drawn to represent detainees, and other subalterns caught in the dragnet of American policy. Rajini Srikanth, for example, discusses the role of civilian lawyers representing detainees held in Guantanamo Bay. Srikanth admits that although activists and lawyers who engage in 5judicial activism “exhibit a remarkable faith in their capacity to intervene and force the state to recognize the laws it has flouted,” their

5 She also acknowledges that shortcomings of such activism: allowing personhood and subjectivity to be defined as per law, asymmetrical power relations between the lawyer and detainee, and personal and atavistic motivations of lawyers (144).

project is important because it is fundamentally one of empathy for the marginalized and demonized Other (144). In New York, Maya, spurred by Samir’s experiences, engages in legal activism and begins working on cases filed by 9/11 detainees who were inappropriately detained. A sub-plot in the film involves her work on documenting the detention experiences of an Afghani detainee, Zilgai, who also suffered torture at the hands of his American captors and experiences PTSD too.

Maya’s work is an attempt to confront the hegemonic system with evidence and consequences of its transgression of law. At one point in the film, when Maya and Zilgai are video recording the latter’s testimony, with Omar in attendance, Omar, and by extension, the viewer is placed in the role of a witness. Although the viewer does not see Zilgai’s experiences (as we do with Samir’s), Zilgai’s suffering and trauma are prominently foregrounded. Since, as Srikanth observes, legal language can obscure an individual’s personhood, these scenes present the detainee’s testimony as it is heard by the lawyer or activist before a case is made in court (Srikanth 146). Thus, the language and overall scene is raw with emotion, and the viewer can not deny the personhood of the detainee. Since civic and human rights are conferred based on personhood (rather than the supposed guilt of an individual), this is a powerful conclusion for the viewer to draw because it implicates him or her in the socio-political circumstances which enabled detention. In another example of judicial activism in My Name is Khan, Mandira too advocates within the framework of the legal and law enforcement system to find her son’s killers. She spearheads efforts to find her son’s killers, and continues to exhort the police to keep the case open. Her efforts directly impact the community because

they are a reminder of her son’s loss, and of the larger social problem of religious prejudice.

Such awareness raising also occurs through Rizwan’s civic activism in My Name is Khan. After her son’s death, Mandira, in a fit of grief, asks Rizwan to leave her and not return till he has given the following message to the President of the United States:

“My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist.” Rizwan believes that Mandira speaks earnestly and a substantial portion of the plot is devoted to Rizwan’s Odyssean journey to fulfill her request. He travels with innocence (attributed to Asperger’s): completely believing that it is possible to meet the President, incapable of hostility, and bewildered by malice. 6His single minded determination is akin to a child’s unwavering stubbornness, and he emerges as a child-hero. En route, he motivates other Muslims to become volunteers and activists, and repeats Mandira’s message to the suspicious communities he encounters. There are encounters with government institutions: a long security check by TSA agents at an airport when he is singled out because of his

‘suspicious’ behaviour (both, because of repetitive behavior due to Asperger’s and his racial features), and a misinformed arrest at a rally for President Bush. This arrest is followed by sensory torture, and he is finally released when his story is picked up by the minority media. While his long journey itself is an activist act, as it brings awareness to his cause, another sub-plot point shows his community service in a hurricane 7hit black community in Georgia. At a pivotal moment, when it appears that the community is

6 This child-like view of oppression can either be read as an indictment of oppression, or an indication of the normative structure of the film which forecloses a more critical examination of the socio-political context of oppression.

7 The film may be critiqued for its stereotypical depiction of black community and accused of showing up Muslims at the expense of another minority group.

going to face imminent destruction, scores of Muslims arrive with food and aid, inspired by Rizwan’s example. Rizwan’s actions in the public sphere enable majority communities and hegemonic institutions to witness a peaceful Muslim citizen.

Further, Rizwan’s volunteerism, although regrettably short-sighted because it wrongly indicates that Muslims have not been community volunteers, is intended as an example for fellow Muslims on appropriate civic behavior. At this point, I want to acknowledge and discuss the normative framework of the film, within which the shortsightedness of Muslim activism plays out. As I noted earlier, this normative framework does not discount the potential of the film, but it is important to consider how such a framework forecloses perspective and action. Two other moments in the film produce, more strongly, dichotomized categories of good and bad Muslim citizens: a run in with a radical Imam whom Rizwan reports to the FBI, and a near death encounter when a radical Muslim attempts to kill him for reporting the Imam. Rizwan meets the

Imam when he visits a mosque to pray. As he is praying, he overhears the Imam and a small group of followers interpreting the Quran to justify violence. After struggling to contain himself, Rizwan repeats the message of non-violence that his mother had taught him and rushes out of the mosque. Then driven by a sense of civic duty, he calls law enforcement to report the Imam.

This scene is perhaps one of the most prescriptive in the film. It instructs citizens on how to respond to fundamentalism – first, denounce it by speaking up against it, and then, bring it to the state’s attention. The latter action defines Rizwan as a good Muslim and a good citizen because it is precisely what the American state had asked of

Muslims living in America post-9/11. (Sahar Aziz is one of many scholars to write about

how the state actively sought informants embedded in Muslim communities. Subjects who refused to serve as informants were occasionally threatened with deportation. ) To further differentiate between Rizwan’s non-violent activism and the unreasonable violence of the fundamentalists, a crucial plot point unfolds when a follower of the Imam attacks Rizwan with a knife and grievously injures him for reporting the Imam, and apparently, betraying Islam. These two characters, the Imam and his follower, are foils for Rizwan, and present the stereotype of the fanatical Muslim which Rizwan’s character is set to counteract.

Without condoning fundamentalist violence, it is important to note why these violent characters are problematic. First, the film draws attention to the mosque as a space that fosters fundamentalism, a gross generalization because this is the only mosque that Rizwan visits. Second, the film can’t help but conjure the same stereotypes

(i.e., the violent Islamic fundamentalist) in order to dispel them. Moreover, these violent characters are extremely shallow, and their motives are repetitions of the West’s suspicions of Islam, and play out Huntington’s polarized clash of civilization rhetoric.

The film allows the reader to misread these characters in the same way that the Al

Qaeda’s attacks are sometimes misread as a civilizational or religious war. A fuller picture of the conflict would have to analyze the economic and political motives of the Al

Qaeda and engage with the complex history which once saw the Al Qaeda and the

United States aligned in Afghanistan. The 9/11 attacks, in this line of thinking, were a statement about the imperialistic, economic, and military actions of the American state.

In the film, however, the violent fundamentalists are not allowed to make this critique.

Neither can this critique of the American empire be articulated by Rizwan, who remains

locked in a state of childlike innocence and incomprehension. His inability to grasp the geopolitical and sociocultural reasons for his own Othering forecloses the possibility of a critique. Through his character then, the film invites Muslims to close their critique of the

United States, and instead, to trust the state. The film’s normative structure unwittingly engages in reproducing hegemony.

I am not suggesting that the film is not conscious of the social realities post-9/11.

As the pathos laden incidents involving Mandira’s son, and Rizwan’s travails show, the film is itself invested in a critique of American society and bureaucracy. However, in an attempt to find a plot resolution, the film ultimately situates the state as a site of remedial action, in an idealized manner. In a climactic moment, the newly elected

President Obama hears of Khan’s story, and agrees to meet him so Khan can finally communicate his message and reconcile with his wife. In this last instant, the film makes a political statement that there will be a change in the situation for Muslims because of the election of a new President who is willing to hear what Muslims have to say.

In response to this idealistic belief, I want to first return to minority nationalism, and later pose New York in conversation with this conclusion. To deny the possibility that the state is a site of remedial action goes against the grain of other minority experience, and the slow, but improving civil rights gains in the United States. Although this continues to be an on-going project, the state has worked with black civil rights leaders. Certainly, it is possible to critique the means of bringing about this change, but this critique should not foreclose the state as a site for change. Further, to deny the state as the space for change leaves the subaltern subject in a difficult position. Where

else can this subject claim remedy? International courts might be more amenable to consider human rights violations, and international spaces might bring the more awareness. But, access to these international sites requires resources and privilege that may not be available to individuals who have already been Othered. Moreover, geopolitical realities may limit the potential of international censure of American policies.

Perhaps, most importantly, the subaltern subject’s desire to work within a national framework is an expression (perhaps, unwanted, from the state’s perspective) of belonging to the American nation, and a belief that the social fabric can be altered, and the subject will not cease work to hybridize it. Where else would an American citizen seek redress against regressive American policies, if not in an American court and before fellow citizens?

As Chakravarty observed, such nationalist impulses reveal fractures in the state which need to be addressed for the state’s future functioning (Chakravarty 242). The other two forms of responses are particularly effective in drawing attention to how the state has been compromised (242). The second form of activism, working with the neoliberal state, is a form of witnessing in as much as it allows the Muslim citizen to demonstrate his loyalty to the state by working with the state. In New York, Omar, as I noted before, agrees to help the FBI, because he believes this is the only way to exonerate Samir. Roshan’s motivations are explored at some depth in the film and initially indicate his ambiguity in working for the FBI. He is aware of the trigger happy and xenophobic nature of his white supervisor, who comes to represent the bellicose form of the American empire. He also states to his supervisor that his role in the FBI is defined by his newly racialized identity – he is valuable because he can serve as an

insider to the Muslim community. When his supervisor complains about this thick accent, he retorts that the accent symbolizes just his value to the FBI. However, he also genuinely believes that he can improve the conditions of Muslims in America by weeding out extremists. Among the three forms of activism, this form is the most co- opted and misused by the imperial center. To highlight this last point, I will discuss it in relation to militancy in the film. New York highlights the extremist reaction to Othering:

Samir has, indeed, embraced radicalism as a result of the trauma of detention and his ensuing PTSD. He has come to belief that a violent act against a government structure is the only manner to recoup his dignity and shatter the hegemony of the empire. New

York presents a full psychological profile of the terrorist citizen. If the film’s narrative is read at a surface level, and along the dichotomized Muslim identities, it reveals minority nationalism that is co-opted into the hegemonic discourse. However, reading it against the grain opens up the film’s subversive potential.

The terrorist citizen in this film, one of its central protagonists, embraces violence after his extended detention and torture in an American detention facility. Although the state machinery considers Samir an Islamic fundamentalist, he is not using violence for religious purposes. As he tells Omar, he became violent as a result of his detention.

Samir is the terrorist that the American state feared after 9/11 - a law abiding and model citizen in every other right, an educated entrepreneur living in a suburban America with a wife and young son. His life epitomizes the American Dream, except for the fact of his

Othering. J. David Slocum, in his Introduction to Terrorism, Media, and Liberation points out that the terrorist and citizen are intertwined, and the former is a “doppelganger of the citizen (as, variously, holder of rights, consumer, solder, tourist, believer” (4). Slocum’s

observation illuminates the state’s irrational policing of bodies, and supports the terrorist’s claim to citizenship. Samir never expresses any desire to leave the United

States, or renounce his citizenship.

Samir’s radicalization is the literal bearing out of the state’s involvement in marking citizens as terrorists. Having been stripped of his human rights and dignity,

Samir decides to act against the state – he plans an attack on a state edifice, an FBI building. While his actions become aligned with bin Laden’s here, in that he is trying to attack a symbol of the American state, he does not use any religious rhetoric to justify his actions. Moreover, he believes the FBI building is a justified target (in contrast to a public space such as a market) because there are no innocent civilians there. The attacks are meant to cripple an agency that was responsible (he believes) for his torture, and that of other Muslim Americans. His plans are supported by a local network of Muslims who have suffered similarly. This radicalization confirms the state’s suspicion about the involvement of Muslim youth in domestic terrorism after 9/11, but firmly implicates the state in that radicalization, and invites the viewer to witness the transformation of the innocent subject. This is responsibility that the state refuses, by proxy of Roshan, the FBI agent. When Omar learns of Samir’s detention, he confronts

Roshan for withholding this information from him and holds the state responsible for

Samir’s radicalization. Roshan is unwilling to accept the state’s culpability, perhaps because this would implicate him too as an agent of the state. Instead he justifies his actions as that of a concerned Muslim citizen by noting the opportunities afforded him as an American, and speaking against Muslims who sully Islam. This exchange hints at both his guilt at, but continued alignment with the state’s actions.

The film’s climactic scene presents the state’s attempt to resolve this radicalization. In a tense standoff between these opposing camps on the rooftop of the

FBI building, Samir is poised to trigger the planted bombs. Behind him, Maya and Omar

(with Roshan’s co-operation) attempt to dissuade him. Before him, snipers are seen lined in another building’s windows, and a helicopter hovers just off the FBI building.

Just when Samir changes his mind and drops the trigger, Roshan’s supervisor orders his men to shoot Samir. In a gory spectacle of death, his body is shown pierced by multiple bullets, and behind him, Maya is killed too. Roshan saves Omar by pulling him out of harm’s way. The supervisor’s move is marked by treachery. Just before the climax, Maya and Omar have attempted to reason with the agents that Samir must not be killed but rather captured and subjected to the due process of law. If this condition is agreed upon, they are willing to speak with Samir to dissuade him. Roshan seems to agree with them, but the other agent remains ambivalent. His actions later are thus, not entirely unexpected, and indeed, they are anticipated by Samir. When Maya promises him legal representation, while they are on the rooftop, he scoffs at her. Thus, the agent’s actions become representative of a belligerent side of America that enjoys popular support. In the aftermath of the shooting, he is feted for his role in preventing a terrorist attack.

The unfolding of these events leads the viewer to see the American state in a critical light: its short sighted policies violate human rights and encourage radicalization, then the state refuses to acknowledge its role in this radicalization, and finally believes that death, rather than reconciliation and remediation, are the only solutions to radicalization. Moreover, the overdone measures kill not only the terrorist, but also a

peaceful legal activist. This silencing indicates then that the empire is unwilling to brook critics of any stripe. A trial (for Samir) or Maya’s legal work for other detainees ultimately draws attention to the ill-conceived policies and working of the state with regard to

Muslims, and the Muslim world. Finally, the impact of the detentions on family structure is seen dramatically in this film. First, the fabric of the Muslim family is unraveled, but eventually (in this case), the empire destroys the family unit itself.

Despite this forthright critique, the film concludes with an assimilationist turn, and

I present a counter-reading of the conclusion to offset this assimilationist turn. In a closing sequence, Samir and Maya’s young son is shown excelling at a Little League baseball game while Omar, now his adoptive parent, watches on. Omar is joined by

Roshan, and in the course of their conversation it is revealed that Omar had stopped communicating with Roshan after Samir and Maya’s death. Roshan tries to reconcile by observing that all the events which transpired (Omar’s spying, the deaths), were “worth it,” and he points to the young boy playing baseball, the quintessential American sport, to demonstrate why the events were important. At that moment, camera shows the team celebrating the boy’s success at the game. The film concludes with the young boy asking Roshan to join them for a meal, and Omar reluctant, but acquiescent to the request and implied reconciliation.

In these scenes, Roshan finally becomes a synecdoche for the state. His continued support of the state, and apparent resolution of guilt has made him a perfect and insidious insider/informer with regard to the Muslim community. He is capable of maintaining the community’s trust, and manipulating the community’s actions on behalf of the state. To understand how completely he is now aligned with the state, it is

important to consider what he is referring to when he says, “it [the events of the past] was worth it” (New York). This second ‘it’ stands for an insular American way of life, which has successfully de-racialized the young Asian American boy. The death of the parents has removed two apparently damaging influences on the boy, and society, in general: the activist citizen, and the terrorist citizen. Their death has also removed their cause, their critique: the state’s Othering of Muslims. Certainly, it is possible to debate the appropriateness or effectiveness of their methods (i.e. activism, terrorism), but the importance of their cause cannot be understated given the disastrous American domestic and foreign policies regarding Muslims and Muslim nations. Their deaths disconnects the child (and by extension, the community) from his lineage, and from developing their subversive tendencies. Instead, he is left in the care of the more tractable character, Omar, who has been willing to work with the state. Indeed, their cause is now cast as anachronistic in this new America which was ushered in by the deaths. Thus, Roshan extolls the virtues of a nation which will allow a Muslim Asian

American boy, whose father was a terrorist, to participate so fully in society. This apparent benevolence of the state, stated without any irony, is the last chilling reminder of what a Muslim in America needs to do in order to enjoy the state’s support.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Dhanashree Thorat is a master’s student in the Department of English, University of Florida. She specializes in Postcolonial Studies, New Media Studies, and the Digital

Humanities. She has also been a teaching assistant at the University of Florida since

Fall 2011. She completed her Bachelor of Arts degree with honors at Kennesaw State

University in Spring 2011, and graduated with two minors, Peace Studies, and Writing.

She is currently working with an institute in India to develop Digital Humanities initiatives leading to the establishment of a Digital Humanities Center.