Submitted to: Prof.

Amritjit Singh

Submitted by: Richa Dawar

Response sheet on the GIAN course “Migration and Citizenship”

The GIAN course on “Migration and Citizenship” hosted by IITT and conducted by

Professor Amritjit Singh has been a unique learning experience as it takes the familiar

landscape of ethnic literatures in the United States and puts it in a comparative framework.

The multiple discussions on African American and Asian American literary writings led by

various colleagues with significant inputs from Prof. Singh, has sketched out a vital point that

in the modern state, constructs of racial identity are often put to use to conditionally

legitimise the constitutional promise of equal citizenship. In the case of African American

community, the delayed dream of equal citizenship in the twentieth century has been

articulated by writers like Lanston Hughes (I, too, sing America) and through

auto-biographical references in texts by writers like Zora Neale Hurston who narrate the

embodied experience of being ‘othered’ as a black in America, where white is the legitimised

norm against which all ‘others’ are measured. Approaching the issues of race, migration and

citizenship through the lens of literature expands the inquiry into cultural identities as well,

especially in relation to the black writer in America who struggles to represent the divided

self/double consciousness of the black individual in the early decades of twentieth century.

The most interesting aspect of the course has been the inclusion of Asian American

texts such as Japanese American writer John Okada’s No-No Boy. The lesser known histories

of racial othering of Asians in the United States, whether they were the Chinese railway

workers or the Japanese receiving the backlash during the second World War, is thus brought

into the conversation around racial identity and citizenship in the United States. In fact,

questions of immigration and nationality in the United States were for a large part of the
twentieth century determined by racial identity and the laws only allowed ‘non-white’

immigration to the States after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Thus, the

comparative framework between various ethnic literatures complicates the history of race in

the United States beyond the binary frame of black/white. The wider range of texts from

different communities reinforces the idea of the “color line” articulated by WEB Du Bois

who pointed out that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line-

the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the

islands of the sea." Often in discussions about race in America, only the first half of Du Bois’

statement is quoted, overlooking the Asian identity which is also part of the landscape of

racialized identities in the white-centred imagination of the American nation.

The emergence of Critical Race Theory which highlights the nexus between law and

social and cultural attitudes towards racial identity becomes the tool through which a

socio-politically oriented approach towards race in the American nation can be developed.

The CRT discourse can also be usefully appropriated in other contexts, such as the racial

identities as they were legally classified and hierarchized in the South African or East African

context. After completing this course, I aim to revisit CRT to connect it to the other instances

in global history, where a combination of legal discourse and social attitudes contributed to

the construction of racially based citizenship rights.