STRANGE RACIAL SUBJECTS IN THE U.S.
The topic for this panel, in broad terms, is the Anthropology of the United States of America. The panel grapples with the implications for thinking through how race operates, in strange and familiar ways, outside of the black-white racial dichotomy. Due to dichotomous categorizations of place, space, and time that fail to account for the fluidity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity of race, various racial “Others” have become the stranger within the normative racial landscape of the United States. The guiding questions for the papers on this panel are: How do racial “Others” destabilize the familiarity of U.S. racial epistemologies? How does centering the strange racial figure help us to better understand our familiar racial discourse? How does studying ordinary cultural and religious practices offer important insight into racializations of communities of color? And, what can an anthropology focused on the U.S. South and Midwest contribute to the remapping of our normative understandings of race? This panel demonstrate show racially illegible subjects, such as Latina/os, South Asian Americans, and Kurdish Americans, challenge our conceptualizations of race. Race has been spatialized through neighborhoods, bodies, and discourses that underscore simplistic black-white logics as the basis for belonging and citizenship (Jackson 2001; 2005; Goode 2002), while discursively, symbolically, and corporeally dislocating racial “Others” (Perez 2014; Fink 2004). Furthermore, when racial others are made intelligible and familiar, it is often through the iteration of the landscape of major U.S. cities (Maira 2002; Shankar 2008), with the notable exception of Pawan Dhingra's work on motel workers in the Midwest. Instead of aligning ourselves with these familiar academic tropes, the papers in this panel look toward Latina/os, South Asian Americans, and Kurdish Americans to provide greater clarity about the racial geography of the U.S. South and Midwest. By exploring their everyday lives, the papers tease out the relationship between race, religion, and “belonging” among “strange” communities of color. Critical examination of music, radio, religion, sporting practices, and activism demonstrates how such quotidian expressions of self provide extra-ordinary insight into the lives of communities of color, immigrant communities, and refugee communities. These sorts of everyday performances of self challenge the contours of racial citizenship, exceeding racial familiarity of black-white while creating their own sets of exclusions. Each paper on this panel provides valuable insights into understanding how race works in the overlooked sites/bodies/communities in the U.S. South and Midwest. All the papers engage with the 2015 AAA conference themes of familiar/strange and aim to offer new theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical pathways to the analysis of U.S. racial formations.