Surveillance, Islamophobia, and Sikh Bodies in the War on Terror

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Islamophobia Studies Journal

Volume 4, Issue 1

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Surveillance, Islamophobia, and Sikh Bodies in the War on Terror

research-article

Author(s): Katy P. Sian

Publication date (Print): Fall 2017

Journal: Islamophobia Studies Journal

Publisher: Pluto Journals

Keywords: Sikhs, 9/11, surveillance, Islamophobia, racialization, orientalism

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Abstract

In the aftermath of 9/11, there has been a wave of intensified surveillance throughout Western democracies in the moral panic surrounding national security. This article will explore the way in which Sikh bodies have become problematized against the backdrop of harsher profiling and policing measures directed at racialized populations. Based upon empirical data, including a series of semi-structured interviews with Sikh respondents carried out in Canada and the US, the article will examine the experiences of Sikhs post-9/11 through critical race and postcolonial conceptual frameworks, as a way to understand the processes by which they have been governed and regulated in the landscape of an obsessive monitoring of ‘suspicious’ brown bodies.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Katy P. Sian

Journal

Journal ID (doi): 10.13169

Journal ID (publisher-id): islastudj

Title: Islamophobia Studies Journal

Publisher: Pluto Journals

ISSN (Print): 23258381

ISSN (Electronic): 2325839X

Publication date (Print): Fall 2017

Volume: 4

Issue: 1

Pages: 37-52

Affiliations

University of York, Heslington

Article

Publisher ID: islastudj.4.1.0037

DOI: 10.13169/islastudj.4.1.0037

SO-VID: 8d3d9ae0-99bd-48b5-a294-c841c70dc84e

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All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

History

ScienceOpen disciplines: Social & Behavioral Sciences

Keywords: Islamophobia,surveillance,Sikhs,9/11,orientalism,racialization

References

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Allen, C. 2010. Islamophobia . Farnham: Ashgate.
Amin, A. 2010. “The Remainders of Race.” Theory, Culture, Society 27 (1): 1–23.
Amin, A. 2014. “Ash Amin.” In Conversations in Postcolonial Though , edited by K. P. Sian, 95–104. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Amoore, L. 2009. “Lines of Sight: On the Visualization of Unknown Futures.” Citizenship Studies 13 (1): 17–30.
Amoore, L., and M. Goede. 2008. “Transactions after 9/11: The Banal Face of the Preemptive Strike.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (2): 173–85.
Ballard, R. 1989. “Differentiation and Disjunction amongst the Sikhs in Britain.” In The Sikh Diaspora: Migration and the Experience beyond Punjab , edited by N. Barrier and V. Dusenbery, 200–34. New Delhi: Chanakya Publications.
Bayoumi, M. 2006. “Racing Religion.” The New Centennial Review 6 (2): 267–93.
Bhattacharyya, G. 2008. Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the “War on Terror.” London: Zed.
Busse, C. 2012. “Politics of (Im)moderation: The Production of South Asian Identities in the Canadian Apology for Air India Flight 182.” Topia 27 (2): 233–51.
Chon, M., and D. Artz. 2005. “Walking While Muslim.” Law and Contemporary Problems 68 (2): 215–54.
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Sian, K. P. 2015. “Spies, Surveillance and Stakeouts: Monitoring Muslim Moves in British State Schools.” Race, Ethnicity and Education 18 (2): 183–201.
Sian, K. P., S. Sayyid, and I. Law. 2013. Racism, Governance and Public Policy: Beyond Human Rights . London: Routledge.
Singh, J. 2013. “Racialized, Religious Minorities in the Post-9/11 era.” Sikh Formations 9 (2): 115–44.
Thomas, P. 2009. “Between Two Stools? The Government's ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ Agenda.” The Political Quarterly 80 (2): 282–91.
Times of India Online. 2015. “Canadian gurdwara vandalised by miscreants.” Times of India , January 10. Accessed March 2015. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/us-canada-news/Canadian-gurdwara-vandalised-by-miscreants/articleshow/45837672.cms.
Tyrer, D. 2013. The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power and Fantasy . London: Pluto Press.
Vakil, A. 2010. “Is the Islam in Islamophobia the Same as the Islam in Anti-Islam; or When Is It Islamophobia Time.” In Thinking Through Islamophobia, Global Perspectives , edited by S. Sayyid and A. Vakil, 23–43. London: Hurst.
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Volpp, L. 2002. “The Citizen and the Terrorist.” 49 UCLA L. Rev , 1575–1600.
Yong, T. 2005. The Garrison State: Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947: Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947 . London: Sage.

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] Ahmad, M. 2002. “Homeland Insecurities: Racial Violence the Day after September 11.” Social Text 72 20 (3): 101–15.

[2] Ahmed, S. 2006. Queer Phenomenology . Durham: Duke University Press.

[3] Ahmed, S. 2004. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 79 22 (2): 117–39.

[4] Allen, C. 2010. Islamophobia . Farnham: Ashgate.

[5] Amin, A. 2010. “The Remainders of Race.” Theory, Culture, Society 27 (1): 1–23.

[6] Amin, A. 2014. “Ash Amin.” In Conversations in Postcolonial Though , edited by K. P. Sian, 95–104. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

[7] Amoore, L. 2009. “Lines of Sight: On the Visualization of Unknown Futures.” Citizenship Studies 13 (1): 17–30.

[8] Amoore, L., and M. Goede. 2008. “Transactions after 9/11: The Banal Face of the Preemptive Strike.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (2): 173–85.

[9] Ballard, R. 1989. “Differentiation and Disjunction amongst the Sikhs in Britain.” In The Sikh Diaspora: Migration and the Experience beyond Punjab , edited by N. Barrier and V. Dusenbery, 200–34. New Delhi: Chanakya Publications.

[10] Bayoumi, M. 2006. “Racing Religion.” The New Centennial Review 6 (2): 267–93.

[11] Bhattacharyya, G. 2008. Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the “War on Terror.” London: Zed.

[12] Busse, C. 2012. “Politics of (Im)moderation: The Production of South Asian Identities in the Canadian Apology for Air India Flight 182.” Topia 27 (2): 233–51.

[13] Chon, M., and D. Artz. 2005. “Walking While Muslim.” Law and Contemporary Problems 68 (2): 215–54.

[14] Dhamoon, R. 2013. “Exclusion and Regulated Inclusion.” Sikh Formations 9 (1): 7–28.

[15] Dodd, V. 2013. “Minorities Stopped Disproportionally in Decade after Macpherson Report.” The Guardian , April 22. Accessed March 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/law/2013/apr/22/ethnic-minority-britons-stop-search-white.

[16] Farmer, B. 2015. “British Army Examines Plans to Create a Sikh Regiment.” The Telegraph , February 23. Accessed April 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/11430070/British-Army-examines-plans-to-create-a-Sikh-regiment.html.

[17] Finn, R. 2011. “Surveillant Staring: Race and the Everyday Surveillance of South Asian Women after 9/11.” Surveillance and Society 8 (4): 413–26.

[18] Florence, J. 2006. “Making the No Fly List Fly: A Due Process Model for Terrorist Watchlists.” The Yale Law Journal 115 (8): 2148–81.

[19] Fly Rights. 2012. “The Sikh Coalition.” April. Accessed March 2015. http://www.fly-rights.org/FlyRights%202.0%20Press%20Release.pdf.

[20] Foucault, M. 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge . London: Routledge.

[21] Goldberg, D. 2002. The Racial State . Oxford: Blackwell.

[22] Goldberg, D. 2013. “The Postracial Contemporary.” In The State of Race , edited by N. Kapoor, V. Kalra, and J, Rhodes, 15–31. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

[23] Grewal, I. 2003. “Transnational America: Race, Gender and Citizenship after 9/11.” Social Identities 9 (4): 535–61.

[24] Guzik, K. 2009. “Discrimination by Design: Predictive Data Mining as Security Practice in the United States' ‘War on Terrorism.’” Surveillance and Society 7 (1): 1–17.

[25] Hall, S. 1992. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Formations of Modernity , edited by S. Hall and B. Gieben, 276–318. Cambridge: Polity Press.

[26] Hesse, B., and S. Sayyid. 2006. “The Postcolonial Political and the Immigrant Imaginary.” In A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain , edited by N. Ali, V. Kalra, and S. Sayyid, 13–33. London: Hurst.

[27] Katwa, D. 2013. “PM Declares British Sikhs Are a ‘Model Community.’” Operation Black Vote , May 10. Accessed April 2015. http://www.obv.org.uk/node/6398.

[28] Kundnani, A. 2014. The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror . London: Verso.

[29] Lentin, A. 2008. “Europe and the Silence about Race.” European Journal of Social Theory 11 (4): 487–503.

[30] Lustick, I. 2006. Trapped in the War on Terror . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

[31] Meer, N., and T. Modood. 2010. “The Racialisation of Muslims.” In Thinking through Islamophobia, Global Perspectives , edited by S. Sayyid and A. Vakil, 69–83. London: Hurst.

[32] Mongia, R. 1999. “Race, Nation, Mobility: A History of the Passport.” Public Culture 11 (3): 527–66.

[33] Puar, J. 2008. “The Turban Is Not a Hat: Queer Diaspora and Practices of Profiling.” Sikh Formations 4 (1): 47–91.

[34] Puar, J. and A. Rai. 2004. “The Re-making of a Model Minority: Perverse Projectiles under the Spectre of (Counter)Terrorism.” Social Text 22 (3): 75–104.

[35] Rana, J. 2011. Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora . Durham: Duke University Press.

[36] Razack, S. 2014. “Racial Terror: Torture and Three Teenagers in Prison.” borderlands 13 (1): 1–27.

[37] Sayyid, B., and Zac, L. 1998. “Political Analysis in a World without Foundations.” In Research Strategies in the Social Sciences: A Guide to New Approaches , edited by E. Scarbrough and E. Tanenbaum, 249–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[38] Sayyid, S. 2010a. “Do Post-Racials Dream of White Sheep?” CERS Working Paper, No. 17. Leeds: University of Leeds.

[39] Sayyid, S. 2010b. “Out of the Devil's Dictionary.” In Thinking through Islamophobia , edited by S. Sayyid and A. Vakil, 5–18. London: Hurst and Company.

[40] Sian, K. P. 2013. Unsettling Sikh and Muslim Conflict: Mistaken Identities, Forced Conversions and Postcolonial Formations . Lanham: Lexington Books.

[41] Sian, K. P. 2014. “Sikhs, War, Memory.” Open Democracy: UK. http://opendemocracy.net/vron-ware-katy-p-sian/sikhs-war-memory.

[42] Sian, K. P. 2015. “Spies, Surveillance and Stakeouts: Monitoring Muslim Moves in British State Schools.” Race, Ethnicity and Education 18 (2): 183–201.

[43] Sian, K. P., S. Sayyid, and I. Law. 2013. Racism, Governance and Public Policy: Beyond Human Rights . London: Routledge.

[44] Singh, J. 2013. “Racialized, Religious Minorities in the Post-9/11 era.” Sikh Formations 9 (2): 115–44.

[45] Thomas, P. 2009. “Between Two Stools? The Government's ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ Agenda.” The Political Quarterly 80 (2): 282–91.

[46] Times of India Online. 2015. “Canadian gurdwara vandalised by miscreants.” Times of India , January 10. Accessed March 2015. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/us-canada-news/Canadian-gurdwara-vandalised-by-miscreants/articleshow/45837672.cms.

[47] Tyrer, D. 2013. The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power and Fantasy . London: Pluto Press.

[48] Vakil, A. 2010. “Is the Islam in Islamophobia the Same as the Islam in Anti-Islam; or When Is It Islamophobia Time.” In Thinking Through Islamophobia, Global Perspectives , edited by S. Sayyid and A. Vakil, 23–43. London: Hurst.

[49] Venn, C. 2000. Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity . London: Sage.

[50] Volpp, L. 2002. “The Citizen and the Terrorist.” 49 UCLA L. Rev , 1575–1600.

[51] Yong, T. 2005. The Garrison State: Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947: Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947 . London: Sage.