News & Events

South Asian Immigrants and Political Incorporation
Thursday, October 27, 2016, 11:00am - 12:45pm
Hits : 137

Professor Sangay Mishra

Political Science,

Drew University

Comment by Sudip Bhattacharya

Thursday, October 27, 2016

     11:00 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.

Mabel Smith Douglass Room,

Douglass Library

A light lunch will be provided. 

RSVP: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 Sangay Mishra is the author of Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). He specializes in immigrant political incorporation, global immigration, and racial and ethnic politics. He teaches courses on Race and Politics, Immigration, Public Policy and International Relations.

Focusing on Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi American communities, Sangay K. Mishra analyses features such as class, religion, nation or origin, language, caste, gender, and sexuality in mobilization. He shows how these internal characteristics lead to multiple paths of political inclusion, defying a unified group experience. How, for instance, has religion shaped the fractured political responseto intensified discrimination against South Asians--Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs--in the post-9/11 period? How have class and home country concerns played into various strategies for achieving political power? And how do the political engagements of professional and entrepreneurial segments of the community challenge the idea of a unified diaspora? Pursuing answers, Mishra argues that, while ethnoracial mobilization remains an important component of South Asian American experience, ehthnoracial identity is deployed differently by particular sectors of the South Asian population to produce very kinds of mobilizing and organizational infrastructures. And exploring these distinctions is crucial to understanding the changing nature of politics of immigrant inclusion--and difference itself--in America.

Cosponsered by the Departments of American Studies, Political Science, and Women's and Gender Studies, the Eagleton Institute of Politics, the Margery Somers Foster Center, and Rutgers University Libraries.

Click Here for More Information (535 KB)