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>> 1 Introduction Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery Bald, Chatterji, Reddy, and Vimalassery In her painting Vanwyck Blvd (2005), visual artist Asma Ahmed Shikoh subtly reworks the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority’s iconic subway map. From afar, viewers might recognize the muted blue, gray, and yellow representation of the city, with boldly colored subway lines coursing like arteries through Manhattan and connecting it to the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Stepping closer, they will find that every piece of text across the five boroughs, including placenames , subway stops, and the map’s key, has been rendered into Urdu, connecting this image as much to Pakistan and Northern India as to New York. New York City has been claimed as part of a larger geography —of people, of language, of lives—that stretches outward from the South Asian subcontinent, across decades and across oceans. We begin with this painting because it enacts the kind of intervention that this collection sets out to make, as a countermapping, as a tool with which to read and navigate the scholarship, politics, and subjectivities that have come to constitute the South Asian diaspora in an age of U.S. power. Maps have played a central role in the imperial expansions that have displaced hundreds of thousands of South Asians over the past two centuries and set them in motion across the globe. For centuries, maps fed the imagining of imperial power as it spread out from continental Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and they continue to function as tools of imperial perception and control.1 In military strategy sessions, corporate boardrooms, and broadcast news studios, maps mark out the spaces of U.S. geographic knowledge and power, tracing the trajectories of military “surges,” outlining proposed paths for natural gas pipelines, or introducing “new” sites of crisis and concern to the U.S. population, such as Kandahar, Bagram, Kabul, or Guantánamo. Like the navigational charts of explorers and slave-ship 2 > 3 century in New York City. As Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan filled movie theaters around the country and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams hit Broadway, the U.S. public seemed entranced with selective , and primarily Indian, elements of South Asian culture. Magazines like Newsweek and Time Out New York ran feature stories trumpeting the arrival of South Asians on the U.S. political, economic, and popular cultural landscape, pointing to chai at Starbucks, yoga studios on every corner, and bhangra on The Sopranos. They trumpeted a $60,000 “median income of Indian American families” and presented profiles of South Asian success stories in the arts, entertainment, business, and technology.3 At the same time, the public largely turned away from the experiences of working-class and Muslim South Asians, and from the severe hardships many faced in a post-9/11 environment of increased surveillance, detention, and deportation. These groups became perpetual suspects as the image of the menacing terrorist became ubiquitous on movie and television screens, in national and local media, and in the political rhetoric used to justify the curtailment of civil rights and the prosecution of wars. Each of us engaged this particular moment in multiple ways: as cultural producers, media makers, organizers, activists , community members, and graduate students. Over the ensuing years, what began as a series of casual conversations developed into a shared desire to connect what we saw occurring in the public culture with the intellectual work that was also emerging at this time. The division that characterized the post-9/11 political climate— between one group of South Asians that was celebrated for its entrepreneurship and “culture” and another that was demonized as a threat to the nation—was stark but not new. This division has existed in one form or another throughout a more than century-long history of South Asian migration to and through the United States. Three signal moments have dominated scholarly descriptions of this history: 1917– 1924, 1965, and September 11, 2001. These are each moments of state action: the first marks the era during which a series of U.S. laws and court decisions resulted in the barring of South Asians from entry to the United States and defined them as racially ineligible for citizenship; the second marks the moment that the United States “reopened” its doors for the immigration and naturalization of a large but select sector of highly educated and highly skilled South Asian migrants; and the last 4 > 5 backgrounds...

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