Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora

Terrifying Muslims highlights how transnational working classes from Pakistan are produced, constructed, and represented in the context of American empire and the recent global War on Terror. Drawing on ethnographic research that compares Pakistan, the Middle East, and the United States before and after 9/11, Junaid Rana combines cultural and material analyses to chronicle the worldviews of Pakistani labor migrants as they become part of a larger global racial system. At the same time, he explains how these migrants' mobility and opportunities are limited by colonial, postcolonial, and new imperial structures of control and domination. He argues that the contemporary South Asian labor diaspora builds on and replicates the global racial system consolidated during the period of colonial indenture. Rana maintains that a negative moral judgment attaches to migrants who enter the global labor pool through the informal economy. This taint of the illicit intensifies the post-9/11 Islamophobia that collapses varied religions, nationalities, and ethnicities into the threatening racial figure of "the Muslim." It is in this context that the racialized Muslim is controlled by a process that beckons workers to enter the global economy, and stipulates when, where, and how laborers can migrate. The demonization of Muslim migrants in times of crisis, such as the War on Terror, is then used to justify arbitrary policing, deportation, and criminalization.

Author: Junaid Rana
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 05/03/2011
Pages: 242
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.76lbs
Size: 9.11h x 6.13w x 0.57d
ISBN: 9780822349112

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 06/17/2011 pg. 16

About the Author

Junaid Rana is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.