Colour, displacement and narratives of citizenship in South Asian/American and African-American cultures: Notes toward a future of a movement

ABSTRACT The current movement that aligns the South Asian American population with Black cultures and Black Lives Matter is rooted in a deep history of the New Immigrants from the 19th century to the present. This essay integrates personal narrative with that of race in the United States and develops a historiography of the encounters between South Asian and African-American cultures. It interrogates the presumptions about how we perceive race, how scopophilic desire attenuates to the visual representation of people of colour. The cultural politics of skin colour and race were ambiguous in relation to South Asians and thus, racial slippage between what constituted brown and black played out in social and legal venues, thus defining who is citizen and who is excluded from having a voice in the body politic. Analysing this history is significant in articulating formations of cultural and political solidarities which are urgent in the present time of Black Lives Matter as South Asians link their racialization to that of African-Americans. It is through that we can move towards a liberatory and equitable future.