Race, Religion, and Revolution in South Asian America

Undergraduate / Graduate

The 2025 New York City mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani mobilized South Asian Americans as a political constituency in unprecedented fashion. While focused more generally on the struggles of working-class New Yorkers, canvassers aimed to speak and listen to the needs and aspirations of people from the subcontinent across ethnic, regional, religious, caste, and class divides. Beyond electoral politics, however, the longer history of South Asians in America has always been political. From transnational revolutionaries to imperial cheerleaders, from model minorities to undesirable immigrants, South Asians in America continue to occupy an ambivalent place in the American imaginary as objects of fear, wonder, anxiety, and admiration. This course explores various constructions of South Asian American identity in the twentieth century and beyond in history, sociology, literature, and art. Through readings, music, and film, students will be encouraged to pursue the following questions: How does the politics of identity operate at the nexus of race, caste, and indigeneity? How does religion index race in the eyes of the surveillance state? How have Black and brown people been drawn together in conflict and cooperation? How do South Asian histories of migration prefigure the mass displacements, border enforcements, and labor regimes that have defined the politics of globalization in the 21st century?