The Imperial Optic: Mapping the Impact of the Global War on Terror on Higher Education in the US and Pakistan

Abstract

In this article, I offer the “imperial optic” as an ethnographic approach to observe and analyze the ongoing impact of US empire on Pakistani‐origin youth. Drawing from twenty‐four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore, New York City, and online (2013–19) with two groups of participants—(1) Pakistani Diaspora Muslim students at a public college in the United States and (2) Pakistani Pashtun Muslim scholarship students at a private university in Pakistan—I analyze how US war policies shaped student access and mobility within each respective institution of higher education. Although I worked primarily on two urban college campuses—far from the typically imagined “theaters of war”—my findings demonstrate how US imperialism was a definitive feature shaping college life in both settings. I show how students encountered US regimes of imperial racialization as part of their educational pathways and argue that localized systems of stratified difference in Lahore and NYC are incorporated into the Global War on Terror and its attendant policies. These global processes of imperial racialization between two otherwise seemingly diffuse educational contexts become observable when deploying the “imperial optic” approach to multisited ethnography.