Postcolonial Ecocriticism: A Preliminary Reading List

Two things motivate me in this blog post: first, I put together a small unit on postcolonial ecocriticism last fall in my Modernism/Postcolonial grad seminar, which turned out to be surprisingly effective for the students in the class. Second, I attended a panel on Postcolonial Ecocriticism at MLA earlier this month in Seattle.

In effect, most of the following is not necessarily material I've already read -- but stuff I want to read. If readers come across this list and would like to add their own suggestions, I would encourage people to use the comments function, or hit me up on Twitter (@electrostani).

1. In my grad seminar, we had been looking at books like E.M. Forster's Howards End, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland. I had only intended The Lowland to be informed by postcolonial ecocritical thinking, but perhaps not surprisingly, we also had conversations about climate change -- more accurately, climate justice -- with those other books as well. Howards End is in part a book about the dreariness of polluted London and the value of rootedness and the local against the dehumanizing effects of transnational capitalism. The God of Small Things, for its part, has a surprising amount of concern for the ecosystem of the Kerala town where it is set -- including the river at the center of the plot -- which we see grow increasingly polluated as the novel moves forward in time from the late 1960s to the 1990s. It's not hard to see the seeds of Roy's later activism on issues like big dams anticipated by this novel; indeed, her essay, "The Greater Common Good," contains a critique of the rhetoric of the "big" and gestures towards resistance in small measures:

We have to support our small heroes. (Of these we have many. Many.) We have to fight specific wars in specific ways. Who knows, perhaps that’s what the 21st century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Could it be? Could it possibly be? It sounds finger-licking good to me. (link)

The touchstone for our conversations was Rob Nixon's Slow Violence, Or the Environmentalism of the Poor, which is a remarkable book in many ways. It both worked as an introduction and as a roadmap for students who might want to go further -- with writers like Ken Saro-Wiwa, Wangari Maathai, Indra Sinha, and many others who we couldn't fit on our syllabus last fall.

South Asian Modernism: in Blog Posts

I recently chaired a panel at the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) on South Asian Modernisms, with three wonderful scholars whose work was new to me, Jennifer Dubrow of the University of Washington (check out her book on Urdu print culture!), Preetha Mani of Rutgers (AMESALL), and a graduate student from U-Chicago, Supurna Dasgupta.

Our panel dealt with multi-lingual South Asian modernisms, from Saadat Hasan Manto (Urdu) to Krishan Chander (Hindi) to Jayakanthan (Tamil) to Bishnu Dey (Bengali). We had a small but very engaged audience on the last morning of the conference.

In gearing up for chairing the panel I started reviewing some of my many blog posts over the years related to South Asian Modernism. I realized I had done quite a number of them -- plus two academic articles... Between 2010 and 2012 or so I was, in truth, working on a book on Modernism in South Asia -- though I petered out and never quite got it together (I wrote something else instead).

Judging from the lack of awareness about the contours of South Asian modernism in the mainstream of the MSA (outside of Mulk Raj Anand, who is pretty well-known), it seems like a synthetic, internally comparative account of South Asian modernism might be helpful to have. At a minimum, I would hope that such a book should have: 1) an account of the Bengal Renaissance as a jumping-off point [not a modernism proper]; 2) the advent of the Progressive Writers Association; 3) Hindi modernism post-independence (Nayi Kavita, Nayi Kahani); 4) Urdu modernism post-independence (Jadeed Afsana; Manto); 5) Tamil and Kannada modernisms; 6) the Anglophone scene (from Anand to the Calcutta Writers Workshop); and 7) an account of South Asian writers from the 1920s-60s who worked and wrote abroad (Mulk Raj Anand, Nirmal Verma, G.V. Desani, Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, among many others).

Owing to my language limitations I am not at all sure that I am the one to write such a book. Though who knows?

Still, in case it's helpful, below is a collection of blog posts I wrote dealing with South Asian modernism, mostly between 2006 and 2012.


Review: A Night in London by Sajjad Zaheer (2012; Urdu modernism in translation; South Asian writers abroad)

Revisiting Ahmed Ali: Twilight in Delhi (2011; Anglophone; South Asian writers abroad)

Gordon Roadarmel and Modern Hindi Fiction (2010; Nayi Kahani; Hindi short stories)

Revisiting the Calcutta Writers Workshop (2010; P. Lal; Anglophone)

Another Look at P. Lal (2010; Anglophone; influence of Anglo-American modernism on Anglophone modernism in India)

Modern Hindi Poetry (2010; on the Naya Kavita movement; a review of sorts of Lucy Rosenstein's collection)

Why I Don't Like Mulk Raj Anand's "Untouchable"... (on representing caste in Indian fiction)

Mulk Raj Anand on the Language Debate (2010; on the status of the English language in Indian literature in the 1930s)

Saadat Hasan Manto's "Letters to Uncle Sam" (2006; early post on Manto; Urdu fiction)

Ismat Chughtai's Short Stories (2006; early post on Chughtai)


Academic articles: 

Progressivism and Modernism in South Asian Fiction: 1930-1970 (Literature Compass)

More than 'Priestly Mumbo-Jumbo': Religion and Authorship in All About H. Hatterr (Journal of Postcolonial Writing)

Slides for MSA Toronto: Ahmed Ali's Twilight Modernism

Slides for ACH 2019: Asian American Little Magazines

Slides for American Library Association

A Few Scattered Reflections at Mid-Career

Full Professor...

I just got word that the Board of Trustees approved my promotion: I am to be a Professor of English. Not Assistant, not Associate any longer: Full Professor.

Unfortunately, this post will not be a victory lap. Humanities fields are at a crossroads right now, and there are some serious issues to contend with. Some of what follows are some things that have been on my mind this year as I've been considering what comes next for us all as humanists.

To begin with, what does "Full Professor" mean? Friends and family have been asking me this over the past year or so since I submitted my file. (I am the only academic in my extended family -- and actually, the first and only Ph.D.) 

In the short run, all it means is that I don’t have to submit any more files listing all my activities for review by the university. Over the years, I put together three pre-tenure reappointment review files, two tenure review files (long story), two post-tenure triennial review files, and a full professor promotion file. Both the tenure review files and the full promotion files were also sent out to anonymous readers at other institutions who had to write letters. Every senior member in my department also had to write letters of support on my behalf; my chair had to write letters of support; the tenure and promotion committee did its own evaluations. At this point -- finally -- there are no more files to do, and no more evaluative letters have to be written on my behalf. I've apparently been evaluated enough!

In the long term, being a (full) Professor means you’re eligible for certain leadership roles in the department and in the university as a whole. It also means you’re a full citizen of the university and pretty much committed to the institution.

“Committed to the institution” should not be a shock, since I’ve now been on the faculty at Lehigh University for seventeen years! I am of course deeply grateful to everyone who helped me along the way. (For some particular names, see the acknowledgments page of my Mira Nair book. It could as well be an acknowledgments page for the past few years as a whole.)

I am lucky… I survived. 

I know how very lucky I am. I came out of a prestigious Ph.D. program and had a good amount of momentum going into the job market. I was also lucky to be doing it in a time of relative plenty in terms of job availability. I do not know how someone with my unwieldy dissertation project would fare if I had to do it again today. And the department where I landed has been flexible and supportive -- I didn’t really realize the extent of that support until I went up for tenure.

Admittedly, I have some war stories (I think we all do). Some of them I wrote about earlier, and I won’t rehash them here. My job is now pretty secure. But what about our graduate students, who face an academic job market that has been consistently shrinking? What about subsequent generations? Even as I celebrate getting this far, it’s hard not to think that the road ahead is troubled.

Texts as Data? An Introduction to Digital Humanities (Guest Lecture at Ashoka University)

Syllabus: "New Brown America: Race and Identity in the 21st Century"

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Spring 2019

Instructor: Amardeep Singh, English Department

Short Description

What does it mean to be brown in America in 2019? How have recent historical events -- from 9/11 to the election of Donald Trump -- impacted the status of immigrant communities? This course will explore a range of contemporary texts from popular culture, including novels, memoirs, films, stand-up comedy albums, poetry (both on the page and performed), and musical recordings, all of which explore the changing nature of identity. Many of our primary texts will explore points of intersection between different ethnic and racial groups, including black/Latino/Asian intersections, multiracial identities, and the broad, trans-racial appropriation of hip hop culture. We will also read from critical race theorists who will help students develop a conceptual vocabulary to engage these issues. In terms of performance, starting points will be Hasan Minhaj, Trevor Noah, Sharmila Sen, Eddie Huang, Rupi Kaur, and Mohsin Hamid. Students will be encouraged to bring their own interests and suggested materials to the course.

January 22       First Day of Class: Welcome.

What does Hasan Minhaj mean when he uses the phrase, “New Brown America”? How might his concept – which is poetic and moral – align with demographic trends, showing how a growing number of immigrants might be changing American society? Is the U.S. becoming more ‘brown’, or is it more accurate to say that ‘brown’ immigrants will eventually become ‘white’ – following the path of earlier immigrant communities?

                       

                        In class: Hasan Minhaj, Homecoming King: clips

                        U.S. Census Document, “Race & Ethnicity” (Definitions)

                        https://www.census.gov/mso/www/training/pdf/race-ethnicity-onepager.pdf

January 24       “New Brown America”: Defining Terms

           

                        What do we mean when we describe some groups as ‘races’ and others as

‘ethnicities’? What exactly do sociologists mean by ‘ethnicity’? Second, what

exactly are the immigration trends that have conservative Americans so

disturbed? Is the U.S. becoming more ‘brown’ or is it more accurate to say that

new immigrants are becoming ‘white’?

Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: Preface and Introduction (2014 edition) (PDF CourseSite)

                       

Pew Research: “Facts on U.S. Immigrants, 2016”

                        http://www.pewhispanic.org/2018/09/14/facts-on-u-s-immigrants/

                        Thomas Edsall, “Who’s Afraid of a White Minority?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/opinion/america-white-minority-majority.html

January 29       Blackness/Whiteness

Where do the concepts of Whiteness and Blackness come from in American culture? How did waves of European immigrants ‘become’ white? How are white and black identities defined dialectically, historically? What might it mean to say that “whiteness is a lie” (as Baldwin and Coates both claim)? If whiteness is a lie, what does blackness mean?

Read: Claudia Rankine, Citizen (poetry)

Read: James Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’ and Other Lies” (1984) (PDF

CourseSite)

Woody Deane, “Rethinking Whiteness Studies” (2014) (PDF CourseSite)             

Some Brief Notes on Sharmila Sen's "Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America"

I picked up Sharmila Sen's book, Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America, as I was beginning to prepare for my upcoming spring class, "New Brown America: Race and Identity in the 21st Century." I have been looking for writers who help us theorize an emerging concept of 'brownness' as an identity formation in the U.S. Here are some of the other books I've been looking at:

• Kamal Al-Solaylee's Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means
• Richard Rodriguez's Brown: the Last Discovery of America, and 
• Steve Phillips' Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority.

These are of course very different books. Phillips' book is really a political strategy essay -- pointing out how immigrant groups tend to lean democratic, and what this ought to mean for the Democratic party going forward. And Rodriguez' book is more a literary essay and memoir than it is a broadly applicable 'theory' of brownness as an emergent racial formation. Finally, Kamal Al-Solaylee's Brown -- a book I would actually strongly recommend -- is more globally focused than it is an account of race and ethnicity in the U.S.  Al-Solaylee's book looks at migrant movements around the world and notes a striking pattern: there are 'brown' migrants working in the middle east (think of the South Asians in Qatar and UAE) and Chinese cities like Hong Kong (many of them Filipina maids and nannies), as well as in the U.S., Canada, and the UK. These workers are 'brown' mainly relationally: their brownness is a sign of their subordinate and migrant status. But they don't form a group or an identity; by and large they are defined only by their relationship to dominant communities wherever they are.

Taken together, these books, along with essays by people like Jose Munoz (who surely would have published his own book on brownness by now had he lived) and the performance and creative writing of people like Hasan Minhaj (Homecoming King), Elizabeth Acevedo (see "Afro-Latina"), Suheir Hammad, and others, are giving us a critical mass of conversation about an emerging 'brown' cultural moment.

As I see it, Sharmila Sen's book is an important part of that unwieldy, wide-ranging, and sometimes awkward conversation. As a community of writers and teachers, we don't quite know what we mean by 'brownness' yet -- but we're increasingly using the term in our conversations nonetheless. We don't quite know what the implications of demographics changes will be on American concepts of race and ethnicity yet (think: "Waiting for 2042"), and we don't yet know whether Trumpism will remain in place in our system (specifically after Trump himself is gone) as a counter to those changes.

In the interim, brownness remains an awkward subject position, a coalitional politics more than a coherent identity. (We need to keep working on it.)

A Long List of Works Now Out of Copyright: Let's Digitize Them?

Updated: thanks to everyone for their suggestions and additions. The list is now significantly longer than it was when I first started putting it together. 

A Note on Method: This list is cobbled together from magazine articles related to Public Domain Day, Wikipedia lists of books published in 1923, and Balfour Smith's extensive spreadsheet of works.

Works published in 1923 are now out of copyright (the reasons for this are complicated; look up the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act for more, or see this article in Smithsonian Magazine for a quick primer). I expected there would be a big rush of digitization to coincide with "Public Domain Day," but thus far there doesn't appear to have been all that much activity.

Perhaps one reason is that many texts now entering the public domain can already be viewed online in page view / PDF at Hathi Trust (see links below). A couple of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels show up at Project Gutenberg Australia. But the number of working plain text or HTML editions at sites hosted in the U.S. is quite small. Moreover, a number of major texts appear to have no digital versions available at all at present (see especially e.e. cummings' Tulips and Chimneys and Wallace Stevens' Harmonium).

It seems worth mentioning that a lot happened in 1923. The British authorities seized a copy of Ulysses in the mail and declared it obscene in January. The pulp magazine Weird Tales published its first issues. Sean O'Casey's The Shadow of a Gunman had its debut, as did George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. The Surrealists and the Dadaists had a riot in Paris, and decided to part ways. And all of the books below were published!

Here's a longish list of texts that were published in 1923, and that are now out of copyright. Where I've been able to find Hathi Trust, Gutenberg, or Archive.org links I've provided those. I will add to this list as I learn of more.

Works Published in 1923 -- Now in the Public Domain

Poetry

Jean Toomer, Cane (Hathi Trust). UPDATE: My bare-bones digital edition here.
e.e. cummings, Tulips and Chimneys (no edition as of yet)
Joseph Conrad, The Rover (Hathi Trust)
Robert Frost, New Hampshire (Gutenberg Edition: January 4, 2019)
Robert Frost, Selected Poems
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (Wikipedia)

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (Wikipedia)

Carl Sandburg, Rootabaga Pigeons (Hathi Trust)
Willa Cather, April Twilights and Other Poems

Vachel Lindsay, Collected Poems

Vachel Lindsay, Going-to-the-Sun

Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Harp-Weaver, and Other Poems

George Santayana, Poems, revised

Fiction (literary)

Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay (Hathi Trust)
D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (Hathi Trust)
D.H. Lawrence, Three Novellas (The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird)
D.H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers
Ernest Hemingway, Three Stories and Ten Poems (Wikipedia)
Katherine Mansfield, The Doves' Nest and Other Stories (Hathi Trust) 
Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories
Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front (Hathi Trust)
H.G. Wells, Men Like Gods (Hathi Trust; Wikipedia)
Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (Hathi Trust)
William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel 
Samuel Hopkins Adams (publishing as Warner Fabian), Flaming Youth (Wikipedia Entry. Hathi Trust lists this as published 1924)
Sherwood Anderson, Many Marriages (Hathi Trust; Wikipedia entry)
Sukumar Ray, Abol Tabol (Wikipedia)
Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Jungle Beasts and Men
John Dos Passos, Streets of Night
Carl Van Vechten, The Blind Bow-Boy
Djuna Barnes, A Book
Gertrude Atherton, Black Oxen (Gutenberg link.)
Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps (class study involving shell shock; Wikipedia)

Elizabeth Bowen, Encounters (Archive.org; short stories)

John Galsworthy, Captures

John Galsworthy The Burning Spear

Rudyard Kipling, Land and Sea Tales for Boys and Girls

Vita Sackville-West, Grey Wethers

Olive Schreiner, Stories, Dreams and Allegories

Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street" (short story that would later feed into Mrs. Dalloway [1925])

Translations

Anton Chekhov, Love and Other Stories (trans. Constance Garnett)
Jules Verne, The Castaways of the Flag (first English-language edition)
Jules Verne, The Lighthouse at the End of the World (first English-language edition)

Colette, Green Wheat

Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers (trans. Philip Shuyler Allen)

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (trans. Constance Garnett)

Nikolai Gogol, The Overcoat and Other Stories (trans. Constance Garnett)

Maxim Gorky, My University Days (trans. Louis P. Lochner)

Knut Hamsen, Victoria (trans. Arthur G. Chater)

Heinrich Heine, Poems (trans. Louis Untermeyer)

Emond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac (trans. Brian Hooker)

Notable Nonfiction

Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Caste and Outcast
Bertrand Russell, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization
G.K. Chesterton, Fancies Versus Fads
Winston Churchill, The World Crisis
Jessie Conrad, A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House 
Arthur Conan Doyle, Our American Adventure
Theodore Dreiser, The Color of a Great City
E. M. Forster, Pharos and Pharillon 
James G. Frazer, Folk-lore and the Old Testament (abridged edition)
Aldous Huxley, On the Margin: Notes and Essays
D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature
David Lloyd George, Where Are We Going?
H.L. Mencken, The American Language, 3rd revised edition
Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America
Woodrow Wilson, The Road Away from Revolution

Popular fiction and Genre Fiction

L. Frank Baum, The Cowardly Lion of Oz

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Golden Lion (Gutenberg Australia)
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Girl From Hollywood (Gutenberg Australia; Wikipedia Entry)
Agatha Christie, The Murder on the Links

Marie Corelli, Love and the Philosopher

Austin Hall, People of the Comet (Science fiction serialized in Weird Tales in 1923)
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (Gutenberg)

Herman Hesse, Demian (first English-language edition)

Dorothy Sayers, Whose Body? (Wikipedia)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves (Archive.org)

P.G. Wodehouse, Leave it to Psmith (Hathi Trust)
P.G. Wodehouse, Mostly Sally
Maxwell Bodenheim, Blackguard

Thomas Alexander Boyd, Through the Wheat (an American World War I novel; Wikipedia entry)

Max Brand, Seven Trails

John Buchan, Midwinter (Gutenberg Australia)
James Branch Cabell, The High Place: a Comedy of Disenchantment (Wikipedia entry)

Hall Caine, The Woman of Knockaloe

Susan Ertz, Madame Claire
Jeffery Farnol, Sir John Dering
J.S. Fletcher, The Charing Cross Mystery (Gutenberg Canada)
Zona Gale, Faint Perfume
Garet Garrett, Cinder Buggy
Philip Gibbs, The Middle of the Road
Talbot Mundy, The Nine Unknown (orientalist fantasy involving the Emperor Ashoka and Kali worshippers)

Liam O'Flaherty, Thy Neighbour's Wife

Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas (Wikipedia entry)

William MacLeod Raine Iron Heart 

Rafael Sabatini, Fortune's Fool
May Sinclair, Uncanny Stories (illustrated by Jean de Bosschere)
James Stephens, Deirdre
Margaret Wilson, The Able McLaughlins (Wikipedia)

Anzia Yesierska, Salome of the Tenements

Introducing Mira Nair: a slideshow video

I put this video together to help introduce folks to Mira Nair. Some people know her films well, but I've found in recent months that many friends -- even those who know their world cinema -- often don't know the full range of her work.

Many of the images in this slideshow are also screen captures I use as illustrations in my book on the filmmaker.

The Films of Mira Nair: Diaspora Vérité is now available in paperback from Amazon.com. 

Slides for AADHum 2018 Presentation: Transatlanticism in "Women of the Early Harlem Renaissance"

New Brown America: Revisiting Sepia Mutiny in 2018

[I'm giving the following as a conference talk at the Madison South Asia conference on Friday, 10/12/2018] 

I view Sepia Mutiny as a space where second-gen South Asian Americans worked on their identity issues publicly at a moment when a generation of talented artists and performers were on the cusp of emergence into the American mainstream. While the site is now defunct, I would argue that the debates occurring on the site have continued to be live since it went offline, often now in mainstream venues and an evolving set of social media frameworks.

Some of the key themes of Sepia Mutiny writing include:

1) The significance of emergent South Asian American identity in the broader North American context. What does it mean to be ‘brown’ in the U.S. in the early years of the 21st century? What terms do we use to name ourselves? (Do we, for example, use the word 'desi' or not?) How strong or weak are our alliances and affinities as a group (across religious, national, caste, and regional boundaries -- to name just four huge fault-lines)? How do South Asian Americans situate themselves against the white mainstream as well as other minority identities -- other Asian Americans, Arabs and Persian immigrant communities, African Americans, Latinos? What kinds of cultural and artistic products document that emergence and work through some of the key obstacles we’ve faced – including especially 9/11 and the election of Trump in 2016?

2. The many, many ways of being hybrid, mixed, split. South Asian Americans are notably defined by generational and intra-cultural variation, but one thing we all seem to have in common is a kind of internal culture clash. How to connect ‘home’ tastes and values to the versions of ourselves we perform in public? How to position ourselves both with respect to mainstream western cultural icons and South Asian aesthetic worlds -- from Indian classical dance to Bollywood/Bhangra? How much does your identity really mean if, as a second-gen, you don’t speak a South Asian language very well or at all? What is your relationship to ‘home’?

3. The ongoing problem of appropriation as an indirect mode of racism and cultural diminishment. In the mainstream, this could be in the form of western performers appropriating Indian cultural or religious symbolism: a pop star wearing a bindi, or the complex appropriation of Hindu devotional practices in westernized versions of Yoga. It could, of course, also be a matter of accent appropriation -- and here, our own frequent criticisms of western appropriation of bad Indian accents clearly anticipated the kind of critique Hari Kondabolu would later make of Hank Azaria and the creators of the Simpsons in his 2017 documentary The Problem With Apu. I also can't help but think of the "Macaca" controversy of 2006, the many, many examples of stereotyping and typecasting of South Asian Americans as either model minorities or terrorists.

* * *

Shades of Brown, Day 3: On "Brown" and "Yellow" Asians

What is the relationship between 'brown' and 'yellow'?

While I feel, anecdotally, that "yellow" has declined as a descriptive term in recent years, it's remained important as an internal identifier and symbol of political solidarity within the east Asian community -- much the same way as 'brown' has been emerging for South Asians, Latinx, some communities from middle eastern and north African nations, and Filipinos (should we be saying Filipinx?). There are a number of excellent recent books that have tackled these issues -- like Frank Wu's Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, and a book I have on my shelf by Daniel Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow.

And when I taught Asian American Literature and Popular Culture a few years ago, I wrote up this "Yellowface" explainer. (It turns out that yellowface has some things in common with blackface in American media culture...)

But here's a curious development: it's no longer socially acceptable to descriptively (i.e,. externally) describe someone of East Asian descent as "yellow." Whereas I identify as "brown" and would not be offended if someone with a different skin complexion also identified me as such. If these racialized terms are at least partially driven by racism, the fact that "yellow" has been rendered offensive suggests that it occupies a different status in the American racial idiom than does "brown."

* * *

On Brown Asians 

There's another book with "Brown Skin" in the title -- E.J.R. David's Brown Skin, White Minds: Filipino/-American Postcolonial Psychology. David (who sometimes identifies as E.J. Ramos David) is a Filipino immigrant and a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska-Anchorage. He's been very active in recent years in public-facing essays advocating for awareness of what he's been referring to as "Brown Asian" identity.

One interesting discussion of brown vs. yellow identification is in this NPR Code Switch piece from November 2017. A listener had written in asking whether East Asian Americans can identify as brown. The author, Leah Danella, started her response with a helpful breakdown of the arbitrariness of these color signifiers:

So, to begin with, let's get one thing straight — the colors that people use to differentiate people of different races have never really been about skin color. Black, white, brown, yellow, red? Those terms bear little resemblance to the actual spectrum of coloring found in humans, not to mention they create false distinctions between groups of people who have always overlapped.

And, of course, there are plenty of East Asians who have very brown skin, just as there are tons of South Asians who have very light skin. This cuts across racial groups. Some black people have skin the color of a chestnut, and others have skin the color of pink sand. In the U.S., Latinos with all different coloring refer to themselves as brown. (source)

Later, Danella goes on to quote from E.J.R. David, talking about the Brown Asian movement:

David says that when people in the United States talk about Asian-Americans, they're about half of all Asian-Americans. And those East Asians, David says, have different educational outcomes, income levels, immigration histories, health outcomes, access to resources and refugee status than brown Asians. (Brown Asians include Filipinos and South and Southeast Asians, David says.)

E. J. R. David

almost always referring to people of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean descent. But today, those groups only make up

So while there certainly may be similarities between the experiences of East Asians and other Asian Americans, David says that the term brown Asians is meant to differentiate people who have felt invisible. It makes sense, he says, that some people might be offended if the term is taken on by someone of East Asian descent. 

"To me, there are terms that only, because of the history of it, and because of the current reality of our situation, I think are best reserved for some people to be able to use, especially if they're using it for their own empowerment, and for their own group's empowerment," David says. And for those people who are not part of it, he adds, "We cannot appropriate that if it's not ours." (source)

Danella is effectively making the argument that East Asians can't or shouldn't identify as "brown" because of economic privilege and the legacy of differential treatment. But this doesn't entirely make sense to me: what about the legacy of the oppression of Chinese and Japanese Americans within the U.S. going back to the Asian Exclusion Act? What about people from China who have darker complexions? And conversely, what about highly economically privileged South Asian American immigrants?

While it does seem to make sense that, historically, "brown" and "yellow" Asians were distinct populations -- again, based on eternal descriptive patterns and the presumption of the transparent facticity of race -- I'm not so sure that's true anymore. If, as I've been arguing, America is slowly but surely turning brown, and if that brownness can be inclusive and intentionally left open-ended, why couldn't people of Korean, Chinese, or Japanese descent identify as part of that loose-knit group? In effect, why couldn't "yellow" be seen as under the broad umbrella of "brown" as I've been trying to redefine it?

* * *
I've been reading some chapters from David's book 2013 book, and struck by some of the ways he describes colorism within Filipino society (both at home and abroad; he sees Filipino culture at home and the Filipino diaspora as a closely networked continuum in terms of attitudes about race):

This is all strikingly similar to how colorism works in South Asia, right down to the contempt that many fairer-skinned Indians and Pakistanis feel for indigenous peoples (referred to as Adivasis in India).

That said, there are some important difference between Filipinos and other Asian immigrants with respect to educational level and economic status, and these differences need to be taken seriously:

These differences are important for David's conception of "brown Asian" as a politically charged marker -- an indicator of a different way of identifying as Asian (i.e., at a substantial distance from many of the cultural stereotypes that have been affixed to the Asian American community -- of being highly focused on STEM education, on technical professions, and materially successful).

Another recommended essay by E.J.R. David is this Huffpost piece pushing back against a New York Times profile of Asian Americans that, he claims, underrepresented Brown Asians.

Shades of Brown, Day 2: Hamid Dabashi's Rhetoric of Brownness

Given the nature of the project I'm beginning, it seems hard to pass up an engagement with Hamid Dabashi, who recently published a book called Brown Skin, White Masks (Pluto Press, 2011). The main intention of the book is to attack what he calls "comprador intellectuals" -- mainly prominent Arabs, Iranians, and South Asians -- who he feels have been too conciliatory to western liberalism (or western imperialism). Dabashi uses the language and logic of Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks and essentially applies Fanon's critique of his peers with respect to contemporary writers and media figures like Azar Nafisi, Fouad Ajami, Salman Rushdie, Ibn Warraq, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

There are many places where I disagree with Dabashi, but I'm not going to go into all that here.

Rather, I'm more interested in Dabashi's rhetoric -- the way he approaches "brownness" as a rhetoric and as an identity. How is brownness positioned vis a vis whiteness and blackness? Since he's replacing Fanon's "Black" with "Brown," how does he position the targets of his critique vis a vis the older tradition of black "comprador intellectuals" they are ostensibly replacing?

The answer appears to be that Dabashi is treating brownness as a transparent and self-evident reality (X is "brown" -- it's as plain as the nose on her face), and he doesn't appear to have thought through the implications of his displacement of blackness much if at all. For Dabashi, the transparency of brownness is due to a racialization that he accepts and never seriously questions.

Here's a pretty representative early passage:

In what follows, I pursue an argument about the conditions under which the figure of the native informer has assumed a key function in the American ideological machinery. In making this machinery, I wish to argue, brown has become the new black and the Muslim has emerged as the new Jew. White stays the same, but it has lost its iconic power to name, color, and designate. (20)

This phrasing, "brown has become the new black," recurs several times over the course of the text, but with little apparent awareness that there are of course still black intellectuals who are very much interested in talking about issues of race and identity. Dabashi, of course, is operating in a post-9/11 framework, and many of the texts and statements he singles out for scorn date to the 2001-2005 period, when figures like Nafisi and Ajami were frequently in the news to represent "Muslims who favor the west." But his apparent complete disregard for what happens to "black" when you say "brown has become the new black" is pretty stunning.

Here's another passage that makes some similar moves:

The most significant lesson in the current recodification of racism in America is that racism as a phenomenon stays constant while its signifiers change visual and affective registers—from black to brown, from Jew to Muslim, at the center of which bifurcations remains a fictive white Christian interlocutor who demands and exacts racialized superiority. Islam is the new Judaism, Muslims the new Jews, Islamophobia the new anti-Semitism, and brown the new black—all in the racialized imagination of a white-identified supremacy that must first alienate (both in itself and of itself) in order to rule. (128)

Here the issue might be that while the logic Dabashi is outlining seems sound on its surface ("racism as a phenomenon stays constant while its signifiers change"), he hasn't really bothered to take the time to think through what racism was and how it worked before its "recodification" in the post-9/11 moment. It may be that Muslims have been racialized post-9/11 (and indeed, President Trump's approach to the Muslim Ban suggests he thinks in exactly these ways), but if so this is happening under an entirely different set of material circumstances than America's anti-black racism. (It's surprising, since Dabashi is a thinker influenced by Marxism, that he doesn't seem to consider that material history important.)  I think the prospect of "Muslims the new Jews" might be supportable -- but that's a religious logic as much, if not more, than it is a racial one. 

One question Dabashi never really raises is whether Azar Nafisi (as an Iranian) is "brown" the same way Salman Rushdie (as an Indian) is "brown" -- and he doesn't really stop to consider whether Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be considered "brown at all. Here, for instance, he simply marks Nafisi as brown -- but seemingly unaware of it:

Perhaps because Nafisi has never taught at any liberal-arts college or university in the United States, she appears entirely ignorant of the decades-long struggle that minorities (Native Americans, African-Americans, Latin Americans, Asian-Americans, gays and lesbians, and many more) have waged to make a dent in the vacuum-packed curriculum of the white establishment. She is, though brown, white-identified to the marrow of her bone. With utter disregard for the struggle of disenfranchised communities, Nafisi squarely places yet another non-European culture at the service not only of the empire's global insatiability but also of its domestic agenda. (80)

Why is Dabashi so sure that Nafisi is "brown"? Here is Professor Nafisi, from a recent picture:

My point isn't necessarily that Dabashi is wrong -- and again, I'm not interested in critiquing his claims so much as following his rhetoric. But his presumption of racialization is problematic, in part because he's not engaging the long tradition of racial identification among Persian and Arab immigrants in the U.S -- not as brown or black, but as white. What would it mean to acknowledge that immigrants like Nafisi and Rushdie might have more in common with white-identified immigrants from Europe than with darker-skinned immigrants or the descendants of enslaved Africans?