Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora

by Junaid Rana

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.

Genres: Islam, Race, Anthropology

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Junaid Rana is an associate professor of Asian American Studies with appointments in the Department of Anthropology, the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He is the author of Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora . His interests include transnational cultural studies, diaspora studies; community organizing and social movements; critical and comparative race studies, political economy, the postcolonial state; South Asia/Pakistan/US.

Reviews

[Kavya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Key text for anyone interested in current-day Islam or labor issues. Closely looks at the function of race and capitalism. Very sobering and analytical. sometimes the author relies too much on theories of others rather than letting the material speak for itself. Nevertheless, the vignettes he provides are crucial and timely.

[Lauren Noel]

Unrated because I read for an anthropology class.