Downwardly Global: Women, Work, and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora by Lalaie Ameeriar (review)

“We overdress, we migrants. We care too much how we look to you. We get it wrong. … We absorb information without asking questions. Questions cost us jobs, visas, lives.” Kenyan Indian poet Shailja Patel’s Migritude resonates deeply with Lalaie Ameeriar’s Downwardly Global. Ameeriar captures the excesses, the “too much,” performed by and associated with Pakistani migrant women in Canada. She details how racialized associations are bound up in government, immigration, and labor structures, evidencing that “jobs, visas, lives” are always at stake in the performance of culture. Ameeriar also builds her interlocutors into resilient theorists who, rather than submit to a system of governmentality that disenfranchises them, disidentify with Canadian and Pakistani nationalisms and use their interviews to perform critique and hold institutions accountable.

Downwardly Global is an ethnography of Pakistani women in Toronto that explores how culture and labor bear on each other to regulate immigrant women’s access to various forms of citizenship. Ameeriar reaches her interlocutors through immigrant resettlement and career training programs, art and culture festivals, and an organization for Muslim seniors. She complements ethnographic detail of trainings and festivals with her interlocutors’ comments and critiques, while also offering historical and theoretical understandings of multiculturalism and settler state formation to show how macropolitics regulate the affective and sensorial lives of immigrants.

The book demonstrates how discourses of culture inform immigrants’ identities as laborers; their excesses of dress, smell, and affect must be tamed and made palatable to the workplace. Yet, there are systemic barriers preventing them from entering the skilled work force that even cultural trainings can’t ameliorate. As a result, many of her interlocutors turn to survival jobs with less cultural capital and upward economic mobility than those they held or trained for in Pakistan. The book’s title captures such deskilling of migrant labor. Her explication of the downwardly global contrasts with South Asian American ethnographies (mostly based in the United States and focused on Indian Americans) that have often attended to men as laborers and women as cultural workers. Ameeriar makes clear that the particularities of her study—attending to the Canadian settler state, Pakistani migrants, and women—offer productive insights into the mutually constitutive nature of race, gender, migration, labor, and culture.

Downwardly Global compellingly describes how immigrants are trained for citizenship through their capacity to work, arguing that the desire for paid work is central to her interlocutors’ identities, an impulse Ameeriar explains as “post-Fordist affect.” Her ethnographic descriptions of resettlement and training centers in chapter 1 show how bodily comportment is regulated, how immigrant bodies are instructed to smell less like masala, not wear hijabs, rehearse new accents, have stronger handshakes, and make eye contact. Calling this recalibration of immigrant bodies the “sanitized sensorium,” Ameeriar focuses her analysis on visual and olfactory regulations dictated in trainings, although other senses are invoked as we hear about sweat, showers, grip, accents, and flavors. Her analysis lays bare the white and masculine codes that dominate hegemonies of “professionalism,” as well as the racism and sexism in a variety of Canadian industries. In her discussion of the sanitized sensorium, Ameeriar also regards the selective nature of cultural regulation, for example in the convenient appeal of South Asian clothing and foods exhibited at city- and state-sponsored heritage festivals, but not on South Asian bodies in the workplace.

Sanitized sensorium also describes how immigrant workers are disciplined into affective regimes. Chapter 2 focuses on a training program for nurses, and describes how instructors coach immigrant women to interact with hospital clients. If a nurse is angry or frustrated with a client, she should take a deep breath, relax, and not become confrontational. In an astute analysis of this emotional management, the author argues that such trainings anticipate racism against minority women in the workplace, but place the onus on immigrant women to defer and manage racist harassment. These...