Concept work with Michael Nijhawan’s Precarious Diasporas

Abstract

Rethinking their mission statement in 2013, Timothy Mitchell and Anupama Rao, the editors of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, note that the ways in which theories and methods of the humanities and social sciences ‘relate to regions, and how regions generate theories and methods of their own, are issues of great interest, even urgency, to the contemporary academy’ (135). Such great interest and urgency pertain, moreover, to practices of ‘comparative or connective scholarship, especially where comparison or connection is itself a subject for theorization’ (135). Notably, while the term diaspora appears neither in CSSAAME’s mission statement nor in its accompanying background statement, it certainly both resonates with and complicates the question of how disciplines ‘relate to regions, and how regions generate theories and methods of their own’; for, the ascendance of multidisciplinary diaspora studies is indicative of an important shift from the boundedness of traditional area studies to the relative openness of ‘transregions, where hitherto unknown forms of economic interaction, religious faith, literary culture, and the like are being discovered’ (135). Diasporas, of course, solicit from us a sustained, and always situated, labor of thinking transnationally and thus transregionally. Yet, precisely how do forms of transregion specific to the historical production of diasporas, including global chains of migration and encounters with various regimes of citizenship, generate theories and methods of their own? How exactly does the study of diaspora factor into and inform major themes or concepts that preoccupy the humanities and social sciences writ large today? What does diaspora entail now from our disciplinary ways of thinking? Such questions are the impetus for this feature section, which takes the form of a theory colloquium on Michael Nijhawan’s The Precarious Diasporas of Sikh and Ahmadiyya Generations: Violence, Memory, Agency (2016). Exemplifying what Mitchell and Rao describe as ‘comparative or connective scholarship’ whereby ‘comparison or connection is itself a subject for theorization’ (2013, 135), Nijhawan’s Precarious Diasporas contributes to social anthropologies of transnationalism, diasporic position and identity, violence, juridical reasoning and asylum law, citizenship, and religion via its juxtaposition and crosshatching of research into Sikh and Ahmadiyya diasporas since 1984. Socially and politically, 1984 is a pivotal anniversary for both international communities. For Sikhs, it is the year of the military assault on Darbar Sahib, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and systematic government-sanctioned pogroms against India’s Sikhs. For Ahmadis, it is the year of a presidential ordinance that, after decades of anti-minority violence and constitutional amendments reclassifying Ahmadis as non-Muslims, ‘made it de facto illegal for Ahmadis to claim official status as a religious organization and practice