Sunaina Maira
University of California, Davis, Asian American Studies, Faculty Member
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Human Rights, Narrative, Political Science, Politics, and 3 moreIslam, Solidarity, and Afghan
This chapter focuses on the possibilities and limits of civic engagement by Muslim American youth in the post-9/11 era and the political implications of volunteerism for Muslim communities subjected to scrutiny and surveillance in the War... more
This chapter focuses on the possibilities and limits of civic engagement by Muslim American youth in the post-9/11 era and the political implications of volunteerism for Muslim communities subjected to scrutiny and surveillance in the War on Terror. Drawing on ethnographic research on Arab, South Asian, and Afghan American college students in northern California, I explore the ways in which Muslim American volunteer activities are embedded in the regulation of “good” (moderate) or “bad” (radical) Muslim political subjecthood. My research reveals how liberal civil rights, interfaith, and environmental activism projects are sanctioned as forms of civic engagement if they evade challenges to US militarism and foreign policy and uphold the tenets of neoliberal citizenship.
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Henna has helped bring India back home for me. It has brought home to me, and many other South Asian American women, the instability and power of the concept of nation, the ambiguity of cultural possession, and the perils involved in the... more
Henna has helped bring India back home for me. It has brought home to me, and many other South Asian American women, the instability and power of the concept of nation, the ambiguity of cultural possession, and the perils involved in the material processes of "bringing back" a memory or fantasy of belonging. Traveling to the U.S. in the guise of "body art," henna and other popular markers of "Indo-chic" exemplify the ways in which the use of commodities expresses the contradictions of transnational capital, gendered multiculturalism, and racialized citizenship. This paper is based on a preliminary study of Indo-chic that is interdisciplinary in its methodology and its conceptual framework, based on ethnographic observations and interviews as well as on analyses of representations, for a deeper understanding of popular cultural phenomena requires an analysis both of discursive practices and of the social contexts in which they are embedded. Interdisciplinaritythat slippery, contested
Research Interests: Art and Orientalism
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Research Interests: Geography and South Asia
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... 148 Sunaina Marr Maira ... research on specific groups of immigrant and second-generation youth, yet most of this work has focused largely on issues and indices of social and economic adaptation of the children of immigrants and on... more
... 148 Sunaina Marr Maira ... research on specific groups of immigrant and second-generation youth, yet most of this work has focused largely on issues and indices of social and economic adaptation of the children of immigrants and on ethnic identity typologies (Portes and Zhou ...
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This article offers an analytic review of US youth culture studies, which is defined as research that recognizes the agency of youth - their meaning-making, cultural productions, and social engagements - in relationship to cultural and... more
This article offers an analytic review of US youth culture studies, which is defined as research that recognizes the agency of youth - their meaning-making, cultural productions, and social engagements - in relationship to cultural and political contexts. The article focuses on four selected areas of research that are influential in US youth culture studies: developmental research, the ‘youth crisis’ literature, educational research, and subcultural and cultural studies. The discussion of each of the four areas is focused on one or two major theorists and a particularly illuminating question or problem that speaks to the larger question of how theory, methodology, and national context are intertwined. In conclusion, we attempt to develop a framework of ‘youthscapes’ to provide an analytic and methodological link between youth culture and nationalizing or globalizing processes, using our own research as examples. We envision a youthscape as a way of thinking about youth culture studi...
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... students were as bold as Ayesha in challenging the profiling of Muslims and publicly claiming a Muslim identity which Ayesha did without ... according to the state's interests in regulating Muslim subjects that support... more
... students were as bold as Ayesha in challenging the profiling of Muslims and publicly claiming a Muslim identity which Ayesha did without ... according to the state's interests in regulating Muslim subjects that support or oppose its policies, as suggested by Mahmood Mamdani22. ...
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This article will examine the nature of deportation as a logic that upholds state sovereignty and constructions of citizenship through technologies of exclusion, discipline, and `removal'. Regulations of immigrant populations by the... more
This article will examine the nature of deportation as a logic that upholds state sovereignty and constructions of citizenship through technologies of exclusion, discipline, and `removal'. Regulations of immigrant populations by the state rely on notions of unwanted bodies that contaminate or threaten the national body politic and so must be cleansed from national territory. My research focuses on the impact of post-9/11 policies of surveillance, detention, and deportation of Muslim immigrants that were part of the US state's War on Terror and were bolstered by ideas of protecting `national security' from `internal' and `external' terrorist threats. The paranoia and nativism accompanying this siege mentality overlooks the ways in which deportation is, on the one hand, an economic policy of the neoliberal state that disciplines labor and depresses wages, and on the other, is also a political instrument for repressing movements that oppose US polices at home and ab...
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... The subculture that has sprung up around Indian mu-sic remix includes participants whose families originate from other countries of the subcontinent, such ... Asian Americans (see Figure 1). They move to the beat of the latest remix... more
... The subculture that has sprung up around Indian mu-sic remix includes participants whose families originate from other countries of the subcontinent, such ... Asian Americans (see Figure 1). They move to the beat of the latest remix spun by an Indian American deejay and gather ...
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Book Reviews Muslim Americans, Islam, and the "War on Terrorism" at Home and Abroad Review Article by Amaney Jamal and Sunaina Maira ... Muqtedar Khan notes an important disjunction in foreign policy preferences between... more
Book Reviews Muslim Americans, Islam, and the "War on Terrorism" at Home and Abroad Review Article by Amaney Jamal and Sunaina Maira ... Muqtedar Khan notes an important disjunction in foreign policy preferences between newcomers and the older Muslim generation. ...
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... 332 pp. SUNAINA MAIRA Harvard University ... Gross, McMurray, and Swedenburg make an insightful contri-bution to work on second-generation youth and popu-lar culture, exploring the use of "rai" and rap music by... more
... 332 pp. SUNAINA MAIRA Harvard University ... Gross, McMurray, and Swedenburg make an insightful contri-bution to work on second-generation youth and popu-lar culture, exploring the use of "rai" and rap music by Franco-Maghrebi youth. ...
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This essay situates the pepper spraying of student protesters at the University of California, Davis, and the Occupy protests in the University of California system within a larger global economic and political apparatus that has defunded... more
This essay situates the pepper spraying of student protesters at the University of California, Davis, and the Occupy protests in the University of California system within a larger global economic and political apparatus that has defunded public higher education and suppressed protest movements. It links a critique of violently imposed fiscal “austerity†to militarized regimes of policing and surveillance at