Copyright by Mohan Ambikaipaker 2011 The Dissertation Committee for Mohan Ambikaipaker certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: GROUNDINGS IN ANTI-RACISM: RACIST VIOLENCE AND THE ‘WAR-ON-TERROR’ IN EAST LONDON Committee: João H. Costa Vargas, Supervisor Sharmila Rudrappa Edmund T. Gordon Douglass E. Foley Benjamin Carrington GROUNDINGS IN ANTI-RACISM: RACIST VIOLENCE AND THE ‘WAR-ON-TERROR’ IN EAST LONDON by Mohan Ambikaipaker, BA; MA Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor in Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2011 Dedication Ambikaipaker Arunasalam, 1937-2008 In remembrance of your love and your legacy of courageous struggle and for Mallika Isabel Mohan, born February 7, 2009 our future Acknowledgements I would like to express a deep appreciation to the many institutions, people and overlapping communities that have made this work possible. This project could not have been undertaken without the Wenner-Gren Foundation award of a dissertation fieldwork grant and a University Continuing Fellowship that supported writing. The John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies has supported my work through the award of multiple research grants and fellowships both prior to and after fieldwork, and most importantly it has provided the rare space where race, racism and the African diaspora could be rigorously thought about and debated intellectually at the University of Texas, Austin. The Center for Asian American Studies has funded my last years in graduate school and enabled me to develop my own courses on Black and Asian social movements and to create self-defined people of color intellectual spaces. Thank you for the undergraduate students who engaged these courses – I have learned a lot from you and I have been energized by your interests. The continued existence of spaces for critical ethnic studies is important for facilitating work that would not otherwise be supported in the US academy. In Britain, the opportunity to work with the Runnymede Trust for Race Relations in producing a major research report was a defining experience. I would like to thank Micheline Laflèche, Robert Berkeley and Ros Spry for supporting my work there. Also at v the Institute of Race Relations in Britain I would like to express appreciation for the welcome and the early encouragement provided by A. Sivanandan, Jenny Bourne and Hazel Waters. The IRR continues to be the place where people from around the world are welcomed in a truly internationalist spirit. Similarly, the generosity of Stuart Hall in helping me get in touch with the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths College is deeply appreciated, and I want to especially thank the then director, Michael Keith, for arranging a subsequent research fellowship and for engaging with my research project during his time as leader of the Tower Hamlets Council. The early support provided by Heidi Mirza and the Center for the Racial Equality Studies at Middlesex University and the Runnymede Trust Archives housed there is also deeply appreciated. There have been supportive friends and family in Austin who have provided crucial support and a community without which the inception and long-term feasibility of this project would have been impossible. Thanks to Martha Diase and Ron Ayers for awarding the first grant to this project, which enabled me to have some British pounds in my pocket when I set off in 2003. I would like to thank my in-laws, Jim and Ora Shay, for their kind and generous support during fieldwork, especially at a crisis moment when available funds were fast running out. Thank you also to all the Shays, including Theresa and Michael, and to Glenn Mitchell, for taking me into the family and for supporting this long trajectory. The friendship of Chris and Liliana Milk-Batista comprised a large part of the years spent in Austin and the love of our god-children, Diana and Joshua, vi humanized the travails of graduate school and put things in perspective. Thanks also to Richard Milk for his wise counsel and many intellectual conversations over coffee breaks and lunches. Austin became a place of our own and it was people like Olgie Milk, Mary Ann Harvey, Lila Haham and the community at Our Lady of Guadalupe church who all made it possible. The journey through graduate school would have been impossible without the steadfast commitment of my dissertation supervisor, João H. Costa Vargas and his radical tenacity and underlying utopian spirit. Members of my dissertation committee, Ted Gordon, Doug Foley and Ben Carrington have also been supportive in a myriad of ways. I am especially indebted to the mentorship and friendship of Sharmila Rudrappa that went far beyond the call of duty. Graduate school would not have been fun without the fellow graduate student friendships that were made along the way. A great inspiration for me and the reason that I transferred from Comparative Literature to Anthropology in the first place was the circle of exciting young scholars and life-loving folks I met in Austin. Mariana Mora has been a constant source of inspiration and solidarity and has been generous with sharing her work, her intellect, her home and her exquisite love of art and revolution. I would like to also thank Peggy Brunache, Pablo Gonzales, Courtney Morris, Raja Swamy, Jodi Skipper, Roger Reeves, Jason Chang, Delia Avila Atmaca and Kaiman Chang for the camaraderie, shared joyful times and the acceptance of my personhood. The organizing work of the Anthropology Graduate Student Association (AGSA) in 2009-2011 in resisting the draconian budget cuts at the University of Texas, Austin vii was also a critical site for continuing the fight to decolonize Anthropology and to maintain access to graduate students of color and international students who would otherwise remain in the discipline of Anthropology as ‗native‘ informants. I would like to sincerely thank the many graduate students of color and the key white allies who stood and fought with AGSA during these reactionary times. The dissertation took an unusual turn with the re-discovery of a branch of my Sri Lankan Tamil/Ceylonese diasporic family, who were displaced to London because of the long-running civil war. Aunty Jeyanthy, especially, searched and located me in London and brought me into the fold of Tamil life in London. I got to meet her children and her sister and she embraced both me and Briana with wonderful home-cooked meals and full inclusion in family gatherings. A warm thank you also goes to my cousin Devasenan Devandra, his wife Eilis Devandra and my nephews Ruben, Oscar and Miles. I hope this work enables their futures to be more ontologically secure in Britain and I look forward to seeing how they take the struggle forwards. In Malaysia, I would like to thank all the friends and family who have given so much to me over the years. My aunts, uncles and cousins who were there for us, and when I was away working on this dissertation, in the difficult period of my father‘s illness – words cannot repay the kindness and the labor of love you all showed. Thank you to Aunty Sangarapillai, Cinta, Singham, Shyamala, Thaya, Dharshini, Nithi, Prashant, Vasi, Siva, Aunty Pillai, Uncle Dave, Periamma, Kumar. The firm brothers and sisters of the Taylor‘s College Academic Staff Association, whose struggle more than a viii decade for union and worker‘s rights in Malaysia is still not over. My departure from the Malaysian struggle still feels like a difficult choice that was made easier only by the kind understanding and firm friendships of people like Ng Kwee Noi, Navina Navaratnam, Mr. Tong and Sujata Nair who were there for my family when I had been too far away. Thanks also to Uncle and Aunty Goh, Anne James, Mark Teh, Yeoh Seng Guan, Leow Puay Tin, Marion D‘Cruz, Charlene Rajendran, Bruno Pereira and Dorothy Pereira for their many years of listening, mentorship and support. The same is true for the life-long friendship and intellectual exchanges I have had with Kirtana Thangavelu, who also re- taught me how to enjoy and treasure the wonderful features of Tamil family life and humor. As the saying goes, a dissertation is a team effort and draws on so many affirmations of love and solidarity. Thank you, Briana, for everything you have done for me and with me. Your kindness of soul, the strength of your love, and the steadfast belief in my abilities has been resolute and it has always been that which grounds me and enables me to venture far and wide. Our journey together has been long and continues in strength, discovery and passion. I miss my father very much, but I draw on his legacy daily: his keen interest in politics, trade unionism and social justice, his cooking of Malaysian-Chinese street-food, his collecting of boxes of newspaper clippings for me as a way to express his love and support for my research, his upstart reflexes when it came to cutting through the arrogance of power, his boisterous and loud way of laughing and his tireless spirit of ix working to give voice to the voiceless, up to his dying breath. I want to thank my mother, Kamala Devi Maniccam, for the tremendous support during the writing years as we all tried to get over our grief after the passing of Papa. Hers was the most difficult loss and yet she was in Austin, Texas, months at a time, to support my writing and finishing of the project.