Racialized hauntings: examining Afghan Americans' hyper(in)visibility amidst anti-Muslim ethnoracism

ABSTRACT

This article argues for a conceptual reframing of anti-Muslim racism to anti-Muslim ethnoracism to account for the specificity of Muslims' ethnonationalities, migration, and religion within racializing processes. Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews with Afghan American refugees, I argue that ethnonational, diasporic, and refugee identities contribute to the racializing of Muslim Americans and shape how different Muslims may respond to and resist their racialization. Specifically, I describe the racialized hauntings, a combination of visible stereotypes and invisible effects of imperialism and refugee backgrounds, that shape Afghan Muslims’ racialization experiences with regards to hyper(in)visibility, self-surveillance, and cultural survivance.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnoracism
• anti-Muslim racism
• refugees
• hauntings
• racialization
• imperialism

View correction statement:

Correction

Acknowledgements

I thank Veronica Terriquez, Saher Selod, Thea Abu-El Haj, Sunaina Maira, and Ronald D. Glass for their thoughtful engagement with previous drafts of this paper. I am grateful to anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, and to the Afghans who shared their stories and experiences with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use ethnonational in this paper rather than ethnicity because there are multiple different ethnic groups within Afghanistan, and though “Afghan” is itself a national designation, it becomes an ethnic designation in U.S. racial contexts.

2 “Racialized hauntings” was first used by Lisa Marie Cacho in her book, Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (2011). In this paper, I define and adapt this concept to explain the racialized experiences of Afghan Americans.

3 During this time, post-Vietnam War, the U.S. passed the 1980 Refugee Act to enable large-scale resettlement of Vietnamese refugees (over 1 million) who were no longer being admitted to neighboring countries while their conditions became increasingly dangerous in their homeland. Some scholars argue that it was in the national interest to accept Vietnamese refugees to renew U.S. moral benevolence and superiority. In the Afghan case, it was in U.S. interests to keep refugees at bordering states, establish “refugee-warrior” camps, and help the ongoing military conflict.