This talk looks at the ways in which the new diasporic subject, drawn into circuits of economic migration to the West, both underwrites and pries open the settlements of neoliberal multicultural Empire. This analysis focuses on Mohsin Hamid's novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), examining how in focalizing US racial formations through the lens of Pakistani new immigration and US-Pakistani neocolonial relations, the novel brings out the deep links between US racial forms and the global restructuring of capitalism after the 1970s and presses for new understandings of racial and postcolonial agency to reckon with these changes. Through its protagonist, the narrative insistently links financial developments in the metropolis to (under)developments in the South. In this way, the novel retools anti-colonial and anti-racist critique to better grapple with the global structures of the new imperialism, which works through “weapons of mass salvation” such as financial aid, liberalized immigration policies, and multicultural recognition, as much as through weapons of mass destruction such as structural adjustment, detention and deportation, and high-tech warfare.

Susan Koshy is associate professor of English and Asian American Studies, Faculty Fellow at the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation (OVCRI) and former director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her work on race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora is part of a larger theoretical interest in modernity, (neo)colonialism, and the processes of globalization. Her research is situated at the intersection of globalization theory, postcolonial studies, and ethnic studies and interrogates the boundaries of these disciplinary formations. She is the author of Sexual Naturalization (Stanford, 2004), winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award and co-editor of three edited collections, Transnational South Asians (Oxford, 2008), Colonial Racial Capitalism (Duke, 2022), and “Monolingualism and Its Discontents” (PMLA, 2022). She is currently completing work on her book titled Manifest Diversity. Her articles on Asian American literature, postcolonial studies, immigration and naturalization law, neoliberal racialization, human rights, transnational feminist theory, and diaspora studies, have appeared in PMLA, ALH, Yale Journal of Criticism, Boundary 2, Differences, Diaspora and Social Text. She completed her BA and MA from Delhi University and her PhD from UCLA.

Co-sponsored by the Asian Diaspora Studies Reading Group and Literatures in English

Graduate students: you are invited to participate in a workshop session with Prof. Koshy on Friday, September 16, 9-11 a.m., organized by Bonnie Chung (Ph.D. student, Literatures in English). There are only 7 slots available for the Friday morning session. To RSVP and for more details, please email Alexis Boyce (ab449@cornell.edu) ASAP.