Chapter 3 - South Asian American Anti-colonial Writings

Summary

During the early twentieth century, South Asian migrant workers, intellectuals, and students produced a dynamic body of writings that interrogated empire, race, inequality, citizenship, and immigration to highlight their experiences as excluded migrants, colonized subjects, racialized laborers, and anti-colonialists under surveillance by US and British officials across the globe. Written in Gurmukhi, Hindi, Urdu, and English, these writings ranged from anti-colonial periodicals to autobiographies. Though clearly anti-colonial in that they were taking a stand against British colonialism, these writings were also an epistemic project that elucidated modernity’s racial underpinnings. While situating their anti-colonial politics as part of a broader global, anti-racist struggle aimed at contesting racially restrictive immigration policies in North America and overthrowing the British Raj, these works also interrogated the logic and practice of modernity, the narration of “history,” and the production of Western knowledge itself.They pointed to the ways in which colonialism and modernity were constitutive of one another and were keenly aware of the simultaneous advancement of liberal democracy and racial subjugation. Taken together, the writings examined here constitute a critical archive that interrogates race, empire, and modernity, while also deeply engaging with the meaning and practice of democracy.