Discussion with Sarah Thompson (Government, Cornell University), Sadia Mahmood (South Asia Program, Cornell University) and author Natasha Raheja (Anthropology and Performing & Media Arts, Cornell University)

Selective Welcome: Pakistani Hindus in India (Forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) explores the flexibility of minority-majority politics in the context of citizenship claims in South Asia. The book offers an ethnographic account of the migration of minoritized Pakistani Hindus to India, where they ostensibly become part of a religious majority. I argue that majority-minority politics in South Asia exceed state borders, in ways that are not nation-bound. Theorizing the ways that national majorities construct themselves as global minorities, and conversely, the ways that minorities imagine justice as majorities, I contend that liberal democracy's minority form does majoritarian work. As more and more national majorities consolidate authoritarian rule through imagining themselves as minorities under threat, this work makes an important contribution to scholarly conversations about political theory, migration, and borders across the humanities and social sciences.

Members of the Cornell community may read a draft of the book's introduction before the presentation (Cornell netID required to view).

Natasha Raheja is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Performing & Media Arts at Cornell University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from NYU and her BS in Biology and MA in Asian Languages and Literature with a focus on Urdu from UT Austin. Her projects explore questions of migration, belonging, and majority-minority politics in South Asia. Dr. Raheja is the director of Cast in India, an observational portrait of the Bengali metal workers who manufacture New York City manhole covers, and A Gregarious Species, an experimental, found-footage film featuring cross-border locust swarms in the Thar Desert region. She is also completing a book tentatively entitled Selective Welcome: Pakistani Hindus in India.