A taste of “Brownies”: Shifting color lines among Indian diasporas in southern Europe

Abstract

Abstract While India is known for its enduring caste system and mounting racist attitudes, its diasporas resettled in Western countries are enmeshed in other (anti)racist discourses and practices. Seeing racialization as a process of translation, which is rampant in transnational migrations, this paper considers the racial experiences of Punjabis in northern Italy: a dense immigrant area, haunted by its colonial past, ongoing internal racism and current southern European rightist xenophobia. With a historical gaze, and based on my multisite research conducted between India and Italy in 2012–2014, I address everyday racial dynamics crossing geopolitical borders and other social boundaries (gender, ethnicity, class and religion). Ethnographic work with Italian Punjabis reveals a knot of racialized/racializing relations enacted in a super-diverse milieu: within and between the immigrant communities and the host society. Despite multicultural rhetoric, besides a demotion of African Blacks under a certain white European governance, South Asians embody, perform and resist the ambivalent nuance of “Brownie” shifting on a volatile color line, as they ironically dramatized in a youth educational project. Delegitimized race, grasping the transnationality of mundane racialization, is a step towards targeting the resilience of racism(s) in a world going plural yet nevertheless unequal.