Brown: from identity to identification

… fast changing environments provide sites for exploring how things that used to be fused together – identity, entitlement, territoriality, and nationality – are being taken apart and realigned in innovative relationships and spaces by neoliberal technologies and sovereign exceptions. (Ong 2006, p. 27)

Aihwa Ong's description of contemporary cultures of globalization, in which notions of identity, citizenship, and national belonging are re-inscribed within the neo-liberal state, summarizes the backdrop for this special issue on deviant brown. In essence, it seeks to interrogate how brown becomes a neo-liberal technology of identification, by which citizenship and belonging is negotiated through a complex and symbiotic relationship between state intervention and everyday culture.

The title, Deviant Brown, refers to this potential for random bodies, whether they are the historically brown bodies of Latin American migration, the brown bodies of Asia and the Middle East, the globalized bodies of migratory labour, or the queered bodies of alterity, to fall under the same disciplining and governmental practices of the neo-liberal state. Here, neo-liberalism is ‘conceptualized as a new relationship between government and knowledge through which governing activities are recast as nonpolitical and nonideological problems that need technological solutions’ (Ong 2006, p. 3). In essence, as I will explain at length later, these technological solutions of the neo-liberal state reflects a shift of brown from identity to identification. Thus, brown, in the various moments described in the issue, has come to represent myriad discourses that nevertheless together reflect a particular situation within contemporary global culture. For many of the contributors, the events of 9/11 proved to be a pivotal moment that justified the deployment of brown as an identification. And indeed, 9/11 did provide an opportunity for the Bush administration to rationalize and enact post-Cold War strategies for a unipolar global order that was in the planning during the previous three decades (Monje, 2007). But as Susan Harewood (in this issue) shows, 9/11 alone did not fashion this particular mutation of brown. Instead, it is a malleable term that refers to the ways in which deviance and discipline manifest in national, regional, and global contexts.

It is this malleability that remains primary to us. We collectively locate this malleability within a context that is marked by the teleological discourse of post: social, political and cultural milestones, ranging from, but not limited to, post-9/11 to post-colonialism to post-nationalism to post-race. Indeed, if we are to do a cursory survey of the history of the United States we see a linear narrative of moments that come together to create a discourse of national and cultural coherence. From its founding myths as a City Upon a Hill to its antebellum and reconstruction story, from the Civil Rights and Feminist movements, these narratives are carefully constructed as moments that signify a ‘before’ and an ‘after’; moments narrativized as events that ruptured a particular existence, the performance of that rupture, and then the continued aftermath of life ‘post’ rupture. Of these, September 11, 2001 is a prime example. The events of that day and the meaning of those events have become not acts, but a space 1 a discursive, spatio-temporal location where culture, politics, and economic interventions continue to be (re)negotiated as ‘new’ responses to a ‘growing crisis’. Within this spatio-temporal context, previously held assumptions about various social, cultural and political actors and actions are conveniently re-categorized and re-articulated in strategic ways.

In the eight years since 9/11, both the local and global arena has changed as governments and citizens respond to the growing crisis of ‘terror’, or what this issue identifies as ‘deviance’ – bodies that are identified and subsequently disciplined as out of control because they challenge the status quo.

Perhaps one of the most recent and cogent examples of this condition are the dialogues centred around the identity and identification of President Barack Obama. Because of his ‘mixed race’ heritage, newspapers, commentators, bloggers, and other fonts of public knowledge struggled with Obama's identity, vacillating between calling Obama Black or Bi-racial (but, of course, never White), and because of his ‘foreign-born’ father, questioning his citizenship and loyalty as a ‘true American’. As Jenny Burman points out in this issue, within the new world of the post, birthright has become the locus of legitimacy – a hierarchy that speaks to one's right to belong and that lays the groundwork for questioning one's loyalties. It was this interrogation of Obama's birthright and loyalty that captured the headlines. A news story, published on August 15, 2008, and which was later retracted, by the now defunct Rocky Mountain News, claimed that Obama held both Kenyan and US citizenship. A couple of weeks later, on August 29, FactCheck.org, a non-partisan, non-profit organization, correctly pointed out that under the British Nationality Act of 1948 and subsequent provisions post-independence in Kenya, Obama's citizenship to Britain and Kenya was short lived. But whatever the reality was, this provided (incorrect) legal fodder for the political conservatives who claimed that this would pose problems for Obama's election under the US Constitution's requirements of citizenship for presidential candidates and nominees. Furthermore, they argued that this would divide Obama's loyalties and commitment to the United States, since his father was a ‘foreigner’. Drawing on these unfounded legal claims and other absurd speculations, Obama's critics tried to hide their white supremacist racial biases by asserting ‘American values’ and ‘American citizenship’ as their concerns about an Obama presidency. This was further compounded by the uproar surrounding Obama's church pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Wright's ‘anti-white’ stand which was taken to be the foundation for Obama's own approach to race. The vignette described here – of Obama's non-white identity and the various reactions to it – is not meant to introduce blackness as part of brown identity, but rather to highlight how the particular deployment of brown as identification that is under scrutiny in this issue has in part become a way to evade the discomfort of talking about black/white race relations in the United States. Consider this: when such conversations about black and white became too heated, especially for the political Right, Obama was conveniently transported to a brown space – Indonesia. Brown space, Sarah Sharma explains to us in this issue is ‘… murky, muddy, and scary. Brown space consists of geographically disparate places … Brown space is filled with a range of bodies who are “unknown unknowns”’. In its very murkiness, Indonesia, and Obama's identity as ‘Indonesian’, and as a possible (even ‘secret’) Muslim, became markers of his unsuitability – as an ‘unknown unknown’ – to be the leader of the free world. In this supposedly ‘post-racial’ historical context, we have become increasingly uncomfortable with the binary of black/white race politics (even though it remains unresolved and under theorized), so the metaphor of brown becomes a more acceptable moniker for marking difference. But because the deployment of brown under discussion here is not tied to a particular somatic, racialized history (like black or white identity are), it is bandied about much more freely and with greater impunity. As Burman contends here, brown ‘shape shifts’ as a ‘figure of crisis’. Her interrogation of non-US based brown post-9/11 effectively connects to and complements Harewood's articulations of the global circulation of brown as a marker deviance. Both Harewood and Burman effectively lay out the contradictory marriage between the visibility of the body and metaphorical life of this terminology. Here the metaphor is not for a specific racial or ethnic identity, but for the perceived performative aspects of deviance and danger. Burman calls this ‘affective recircuitry – “a crisis-based realignment of vectors of trust and suspicion in all directions … that is nourished by political and media fear-mongering”’ (this issue). And certainly the political and media frenzy surrounding Obama's identity is a primary example of this. The triangulation of President Obama's racial make-up, of Indonesia as a brown space vis-à-vis Islam, and of the vague yet somehow ubiqiutous threat of terrorism, reminds us that our understanding of difference via deviance has changed following 9/11.

Who owns brown?: Genealogies, territories, and new configurations

As we grapple with this particular mutation of brown, it is also useful to revisit its existing incarnations in order to understand how it adds to, or can be distinct from, current configurations of identity. As Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo elaborate in this issue, brown has historically, at least within the United States, been considered either within the framework of Latino/a and Chicano/a Studies, or within the discourse of American multiculturalism as an intervention in the binarism of black/white racial politics (see Lugo-Lugo and Bloodsworth Lugo in this issue for a more detailed description of this history). Furthermore, Harewood, in this issue, shows that brown also has a long history in the Caribbean, as she maps the intricate differences between Guyanese Brown, Creole Brown, and East Indian Brown. Brown as a somatic marker and as an epistemological condition has a diverse and winding history. Interestingly, as I worked through this issue, as well as another project that refers to South Asia as a brown space, several people, including anonymous reviewers, have asked why I have chosen to focus on brown, especially South Asian and Middle Eastern brown, without more clearly and in detail, acknowledging that Latina/o American has been brown ‘longer’. I fully recognize that somatic brown has a history that is deeply connected, especially in the academy, to Latin American Studies, Latina/o Studies, and Chicana/o Studies, but the intent of this issue, and of my broader epistemological project, is to understand how brown manifests outside this known, documented, and acknowledged history, and the impact of such in contemporary culture. It also important to consider what it is about both academic culture and everyday culture that evokes territorialization over a term that can be perceived as derogatory, as well as what this territorialization says about how we embrace identifications and mark our own bodies within hegemonic hierarchies of ethnic and racial superiority. It begs the question where and how knowledge is produced and made systemic. Perhaps Anibal Quijano provides the clearest answer when he connects knowledge production to colonization and the subsequent embracement of colonial subjectivity as epistemological fact. In a detailed dissection of arbitrary relationships between the categories of identity and identification, Quijano contends that ‘… the colonial structure of power produced the social discriminations which later were codified as “racial”, “ethnic”, “anthropological” or “national”, according to the times, agents and populations involved. These intersubjective constructions, produced by colonial domination by the Europeans, were even assumed to be categories (of “scientific” and “objective” pretension) with a historical significance. That is, as a natural phenomena, not referring to the history of power. This power structure was, and still is, the framework within which operate the other social relations of classes and estates’ (2007, p. 169). Quijano's observations here of the colonized self, and the continued allegiance to knowledge production through colonial frameworks, provides some insight to the subtle battles of territorialization over the ownership of brown. As with most colonized subjects, metaphorical or otherwise, to give up or share part of a history that clearly speaks to their oppression and reclamation of self is challenging. But as I have previously explained, the intent of this particular project is in no way intended to ignore the history connected to the somatic identity of a particular mutation of brown, but to interrogate its new manifestations. It is also, taking a cue from Quijano, attempting to think through ‘production of knowledge, reflection, and communication’ outside ‘the pitfalls of European rationality/modernity’ (p. 177) that has characterized the study of identity within academia for so long. As Zygmunt Bauman posits:

In our liquid modern times the world around us is sliced into poorly coordinated fragments while our individual lives are cut into a succession of ill connected episodes. Few if any of us can avoid the passage through more than one genuine or putative, well integrated or ephemeral ‘community of ideas or principles’, so most of us have trouble with resolving … the issue of la memete (the consistency and continuity of our identity over time). Few if any of us are exposed to just one ‘community of ideas and principles’ at a time, and so most of us have similar trouble with the issue of l'ipseite (coherence of what distinguishes us as people. (2004, p. 13)

Within such a ‘liquid modern’ configuration, where our identities are indeed being sliced into at times broader, and at times even more miniscule, configurations or ‘ill connected episodes’, the term ‘identity politics’ may now be less useful than it was in the past. Here I evoke Wendy Brown, who asks ‘what kind of political recognition can identity based claims seek – and what kind can they be counted on to want – that will not resubordinate a subject itself historically subjugated through identity, through categories such as race or gender that emerged and circulated as terms of power to enact subordination?’ (1995, p. 55). Fully recognizing the challenge posed by brown, at the same time, I do not wish to lose sight of Stuart Hall's (1996) evocation of Derrida's notion of ‘thinking at the limit’: the double bind of having to talk through the very categories that you seek to challenge or dismantle.

Thus, acknowledging this double bind, I seek to explain why, in the post 9/11 existence, the approach to identity within American cultural studies2 needs to be re-evaluated.3 Connected to this re-evaluation is the claim that in this current socio-political context the study of representation alone, borrowed from, and fashioned after, media studies, will not suffice for cultural studies.4 Studies that focus on representation do function as important verifications and documentations of the particular cultural realties that circulate within contemporary culture. But as Foucault and others have noted, to continue focusing on the subordination and subjugation of marginalized identities can be disempowering for those who are approached as subjugated subjects, and also creates a false belief that absolute liberty is possible.5 Instead, I feel that it is important to recognize the cultural moment we live in and use it to re-invigorate the approach to identity within the ‘field’ of cultural studies, understanding that it is ‘more than text or commodity’ and in that, seeks to explain a larger relationship between culture and power (Grossberg 1997).

It is in order to do this that brown is used as a particular identity that is characteristic of these times. By this I mean that brown can be conceptualized as a metaphor that – outside its circulation in the academy as a strategic concept that marks Latina/o identity and South Asian identity – is employed broadly, if not often overtly, to mark deviance. Furthermore, it brings together multiple socio-political issues/identities/performances that separate it from the somatic history that it has been tied to. For example, Lugo-Lugo and Bloodsworth-Lugo, in this issue, explain the ‘rhetorical and practical intersections of same sex couples, “terrorists,” and “immigrants,” have recently served as a twenty-first-century convectional oven’. They contend that, in continuing efforts to demarcate and identify ‘un-American’ bodies, gay bodies are conflated with terrorist bodies and are ‘browned’ in this convectional oven. Both act as ‘threats to civilization’ that require constitutional and institutional intervention. Within this process of conflating and marking deviant bodies, the browning is no longer limited to marking the exotic in mainstream media representations or only used to justify obscure and racist tropes of nationalism. Instead it is deployed simultaneously by cultural and political producers to rationalize very public cultural, political, and economic changes and neo-nationalisms, both in the United States and abroad. In this sense, brown becomes a new coherence of racialized discourse, deployed broadly by cultural and political producers. It is this process of deploying brown identities in multiple contexts, and the responses to this, socially and politically, that I argue is of importance to cultural studies.

I say this for two reasons: First, because this is a condition that is historically grounded, but is manifesting in more complex ways (and therefore in more interesting ways that articulate the inherent relationship between culture and power) right now, and its immediacy provides a moment for intervention, theoretically and politically for cultural studies.6 Second, cultural studies, both British and American, has never explicitly dealt with brown, outside of post-colonial references to such, as a peculiar and deeply historical mark of cultural identity that complicate the simple black/white binary, even though we have made references to the ‘Brown Atlantic’ (see Prashad 2000, Desai 2003).7 A lack of explicit engagement with brown is no surprise considering the cultural and historical past connected to race and race relations in both Great Britain and the United States. Both countries have struggled, and continue to struggle, with their racist plundering of Africa and the forced movement of Africans from and within the continent.8 These histories and their enduring legacies not only influence the cultural, political, and social make up of Britain and the United States, but because these tensions are unresolved and often violently visible, the black/white binary continues to dominate academic discourses of race on both sides of the Atlantic.9 For British cultural studies, the theorizing of race has been shaped by Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, whose research and focus has remained the relationship between Britain, its colonized black subjects, and the black diaspora. From Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978), through There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack (Gilroy 1991) and The Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993)10, identity has been defined by the relationship between particular notions of blackness and a white Empire. The adoption of this black/white identity matrix has dominated the cultural studies approach to any kind of racialized discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Furthermore, any intervention into this racial dichotomy by post-colonial studies was muted when, in carving out its disciplinary boundaries, post-colonial studies identified the struggles between the British Empire and the geographies East of Empire, as its birth. This bifurcation – black/white to the West, brown/white to the East – created a spatial and geographic specialization in the received academic approaches to race and race formation.11 When it became obvious over the years that brown, in the form of Latin America, was complicating these geographical specializations, Latino/a Studies, and Chicano/a Studies provided yet another geographical lens and corresponding theoretical tools. This map of black, white and brown in the academy is not laid out here as a critique, but rather as a rationale for cultural studies to map its own approach to analysing brown beyond the specialized/spacialized approach borrowed from other disciplines. I fully acknowledge that post-colonial studies, and black studies have found a productive home in cultural studies, and that such convergences have had and continue to have considerable epistemological and philosophical use. At the same time, I believe that it would be short sighted to ignore how brown is being re-mapped, re-made, and re-marked both in the United States and globally – as an identification rather than an identity, distinct from previous articulations of race and identity. This more recent amalgam makes it a useful and timely concept for cultural studies to engage with. In this sense, cultural studies becomes its own cultural geographer – but a geographer interested in mapping the broader cultural relationships of power, rather than those marked by constructed geographies connected to ‘authentic’ identities. It also allows for a more fruitful conversation on how this particular notion of brown can intersect with pre-existing conditions of ethnic configurations. For example, Mehdi Semati's essay in this issue reminds us that state constructed deviance and the implementation of correlative disciplining is historical, and not merely a by-product of 9/11. He also lucidly articulates the relationship between the ‘popular’ body of brown of the Islamic terrorist that is separated from other brown bodies, and (re)presented via cinematic and television spectacle. Indeed, Semati's vignette of Oprah educating the general public about Islam in an episode titled Islam 101 reminds us of the seamless convergence between popular culture and state intervention. Further, Oprah's evocation of the corporeality between the Islamic (brown) self and the black body as ‘misunderstood’ reminds us that brown also becomes an extension, or even shorthand, for existing conditions that remain unresolved.

Moving beyond identity: brown as an ‘identificatory strategy’12

I begin here by stating that identity, as a fixed mark, however creatively we approach it – contextual, subjective, internally and externally constructed by individuals etc. – remains constrained by that sense of fixedness. It is, once given, non-negotiable. One remains, regardless of the internal renegotiations that one has made of ones identity, externally identified within designated and fixed markers. Normative identities such as black, white, man, woman, remain historically bound, and carry with them the legacy – and baggage – of this history. In this sense, they become increasingly difficult to reformulate or rethink outside of these histories. It is here that brown becomes more useful for contemporary cultural studies to reconceptualize its own approach to identity. Newly arrived, newly categorized, both broadly as race, and broadly as metaphor, brown is now circulated as a particular broader identification within the current socio-political context.13 As such, it becomes emblematic of Hall's (1996) notion of identification – as a challenge to the normative assumptions of identity as a ‘stable core of self, unfolding from beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without change’ – providing an analytically richer process of thinking through the markings of self and other. Hall presents this definition of identification within a call to ‘situate the debates of identity within all those historically specific developments and practices which have disturbed the relatively “settled” character of many populations and cultures’ (1996, p. 4). While I agree with Hall on the strategic use of identification, I feel at this juncture that Hall's critical, non-essentialist, meaning of identification has butted heads with the current use of the word and its circulatory practices in cultural and political contexts. In the post 9/11 context, identification has been re-inscribed by the state14 as a tool of national security,15 devaluing the use of ‘identification’ as a tool to rethink identity in more complex and exegetic ways. Indeed, as the ongoing debates on immigration and border control in North America and Europe highlight, identification has been used to separate those who belong from those who do not. And it is here that (metaphorical) brown becomes a strategic identificatory tool, a governmental strategy of the state, rather than a challenge to essentialist notions of identity.

For me, brown becomes part of what Craig Robertson (2006) has called ‘a technology of verification’. While Robertson focuses specifically on the passport as the object of his analysis, what I am extracting from his work is his concept of a ‘technology of verification’ where the actual instrument of identification creates the identification: ‘… verification establishes a correspondence between a bureaucratic expression … and a person … That is, what becomes accepted as objective practices of verification in “fact” produce the very criteria they utilize – verification produces the verifiable object it requires’ (Robertson 2006, p. 189). In this sense, while brown as an identificatory strategy may not carry the essentialist baggage of identity, if we are to use Hall's definition, by being ‘strategic’ and ‘positional’ it becomes incorporated into a system that is used to police an abstract notion of belonging. As such, the ‘fantasmic’, constructed as it is from without rather than within, is articulated by the state through various cultural and symbolic processes that are meant to control.

After 9/11 the identificatory chain proceeds along these lines: a militant Muslim becomes an Arab, an Arab becomes a terrorist, an Indian Sikh an Arab, The Sikh becomes brown, and brown becomes terror. Similarly, Bollywood becomes India, India becomes South Asia, South Asia arrives at Target in the form of $1 bindhi packs, and brown becomes a fashion statement and Disneyfied cultural commodity. As these two narratives of identification simultaneously circulate and collide – ‘sutured’ together16 – both the political state – the representative governing bodies within politics – and the cultural state – the representative creators of cultural production – the ‘hegemons’, have successfully managed, through strategic deployments of identification, to police and maintain brown as particular broader metaphorical identity, connected mostly to coloured, deviant bodies, which then comfortably fits within popular discourses and narratives of racialized minorities.17 Laclau (1996), Derrida (1974) and Butler (1990), among others, have argued that marked identities (such as woman and black) are built on exclusion, and are juxtaposed against unmarked norms (such as man and white). This exclusion acts as a method of policing borders. In other words, in order for there to be a stable centre, there must be a periphery against which it is measured. However, while this has been historically and categorically true, the widespread visibility and deployment of brown in popular culture, as a cultural commodity, and in political discourse as an immigration issue and terrorist threat, challenges a simple centre-periphery model. Furthermore, constructing it as a centre-periphery model, as has been common governmental practice, hides the more powerful and insidious nature of this particular constructed identification. Brown is not marginal, the way past racialized identities have been. Instead, by broadly classifying brown and circulating it in strategic ways across the centre, the peripherization of brown seems necessary and indeed, justifiable.

Circulating brown as an identificatory strategy

The broad circulation of brown culturally, and its perpherization, politically and governmentally, are interconnected in that they feed off each other. This symbiotic relationship supports the cultural manifestations (as a symbol of some abstract multiculturalism) at the same time it justifies the political interventions. This is possible only because the anomalous, a-historical nature of brown, as it is circulated in the United States, is approached as an identification (randomly designated rather than historically grounded), that needs to be policed and controlled.

This form of thinking has become especially lucid following 9/11. In 2001, when films like Bend it like Beckham that focused on American exceptionalism18 circulated in the United States, 641 acts of violence against South Asian and Arab Americans, were documented in the six days following 9/11 (American Backlash 2001). While American audiences cheered a British-Indian girl as she defied her parents to come to America and play soccer, living out her American Dream, other Americans were busy telling random assortments of people, identified as brown threats, to ‘go back to their own country’.

On January 27, 2006, Passions, a soap opera on the US television network NBC, aired a much hyped and promo-ed dream sequence. Mimicking a dance sequence common to Bollywood films, the seven-minute clip was meant as an introductory vision of the impending nuptials, in India, of the hero and heroine. For the purposes here, I am less interested in an analysis of the sequence itself. Instead, what is more telling is the circulation of this particular identification of brown on the notoriously Anglophone and ethnocentric genre of daytime soap operas. In this instance, brown, as a cultural industry, visualized and articulated through Bollywood, interpellates with an American audience as a non-American, deliciously kitsch, symbol of Other. Made simultaneously exotic and benign, it acts as the perfect foil to an issue of Newsweek devoted to India, published six weeks later on March 6. The front cover, featuring Salman Rushdie's (now ex-) wife and muse, Padma Lakshmi, and straddling the globality of brown – from Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist Jhumpa Lahiri discussing her Indian heritage (as non-American) to a call centre worker in front of the Taj Mahal – the issue, both in context and in its very existence, symbolizes the simultaneous fetishizing, fear, and taming of brown.

Keeping with this trend, in 2007, both Canada and the United States debuted sitcoms that deal with the arrival of brown bodies to Midwestern locales in both geographies. In Canada, Little Mosque on the Prairie, created by Zarqa Nawaz, provides a somewhat stereotypical, but relatively positive, view of the Muslim community. In Aliens in America, created by David Guarascio and Moses Port for CBS owned cable station The CW, the Tolchucks, a white family from Medora, Wisconsin, deals with the arrival of Raja Musharaff, a 16-year-old Pakistani exchange student, to their home. The ensuing misunderstandings and cultural differences, (including the arrest of Raja for buying parts to build bombs when he was buying materials to build a rocket for a school project), make up the formulaic, Huntingtonian ‘clash of civilizations’ discourse that pervades US political culture. One can assume that most viewers remain ignorant to the fact that Raja is a Hindu name that would not be given to a Muslim boy, and that considering the intricacies of Pakistani class structure the possibility of a Pakistani exchange student arriving in a kufi cap and kurta, rather than a baseball cap and jeans, is so remote as to be vitually non-existent. But it serves its purpose. It reminds us that brown is alien. Brown is confusing and possibly threatening. And, much like the adoption of a feral animal, is best tamed as soon as possible.

This cultural circulation of brown is juxtaposed against the ongoing debate in Congress over immigration policy. For example, in 2007, the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (S. 1348) (110th Congress, 2007) proposed to grant over nine million ‘illegal’ immigrants work visas and permanent residency cards, at the same time it sought to increase the security – and build a permanent barrier – on the border between the United States and Mexico. Thus, the cultural process of identification of a particular notion of brown, through the banality of Bollywood dance sequences, is also representative of the perceived political threat of brown through immigration. While I use India here as an example, it is important to recognize that this process of taming (for fear of invasion) is beyond a somatically identifiable, racial identity. The notion of brown is deployed, as something outside the black/white dichotomy, to mark arbitrary threats. In essence, offering 9/11 as their rationale, the cultural and political hegemons continue to exploit and reproduce a deeply historical fear of ‘Otherness’.

This fear is built on the discursively constructed ‘growing threat’ of immigration, which has resulted in legal interventions over a number of years, including the 1994 ‘save our state’ amendment, or Proposition 187, of California.19 Under this proposition, all ‘illegal aliens’ were to be denied public health care, public education, and any other public services, as ‘non-Americans’ or ‘non-legal aliens’. While Proposition 187 failed in 1994, due to protests by civil rights and immigrant advocacy groups, the current immigration bill under debate builds on this same notion of ‘America-for-Americans’. While the current bill grants work visas and provides services to existing illegal immigrants it does so under a neo-liberal model of benevolence that allows for corporations to keep their existing (largely illegal) workforce, while making it more difficult (and more dangerous) for newer immigrants to enter the country. After all, ‘populations governed by neoliberal technologies are dependent on others who are excluded from neoliberal considerations’ (Ong 2006, p. 4).

In order to fully grasp the implications of this and its connection to brown, one must recognize that the largest numbers of illegal immigrants who are in the service sector are from Latin/South America and South Asia. In addition, as noted earlier, Arab identities are often conflated with South Asian identities and also circulated as ‘threats’. Within the current socio-politics that are articulated through the lens of 9/11, the logics of historical diasporas that result in varied and multiple somatics that defy any kind of essentialist identity are forgotten as brown is deployed freely as an identificatory strategy that can easily be transported from one marginal body to another. It becomes simultaneously the call centre worker in India, the Bollywood dancer on the television, the Arab terrorist in the news, and the protestor on the street. In this sense, identification becomes, as Hall explains, ‘a construction, a process never completed’ (1996, p. 2). While Hall sees this ephemerality as positive – and, theoretically, I agree – I argue that in its incompletion, identification has become a more powerful tool for constructing arbitrary identities that serve strategic political and cultural purposes of discipline.

This notion that anyone one could be labelled, at any given time, with an identity that is increasingly wielded as a justification for strategic cultural and political practices that work against them, is significant. This strategy is not a publicly historicized discourse or condition, born in relation to another specific identity, such as our understanding of black and white. Instead it is a mode of identification that can move from body to body, based on seemingly unconnected cultural and political relations. But the reality is that these relations are not random. They are carefully mapped strategies to maintain a social order that preceded the present. They work together to provide a seamless, cohesive ideology that seeks to sustain a status quo that naturalizes the representation and the political intervention. In essence they work, in Foucault's words, as ‘a forms of political literature that addresses what the order of a society should be, what a city should be, given the requirements of the maintenance of order; given that one should avoid epidemics, avoid revolts, permit a decent and moral family life’ (Foucault 2000, quoted in Rabinow 1984, p. 239).

For cultural studies then, it is this moment, in which a deeply historical project of marginalization comes to fruition that becomes useful. To excavate the genealogy of the current manifestations of brown, and to map the concept as iconic of the intricate and interwoven relationship between culture and power, is essential to the field. Not merely because these relationships exist, but also because by doing so, it uncovers the limitations of approaching identity merely as somatic hierarchies that can be documented through the study of representation. By including other histories – such as Judeo-Christian neo-nationalisms, military power, and various other practices of social control – along side the narratives of migration and diaspora, we can make more significant contributions both epistemologically and politically. It is with this much larger project that the following contributors engage.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Lawrence Grossberg and Della Pollock for their support, anonymous reviewers for the invaluable comments and feedback, and David Monje and Craig Robertson for reading various versions of this article.

Notes

1. I conceptualize this through the work of Lawrence Grossberg (1996) who has argued that modern identity is often approached through the logic of temporality, where time is not only understood as separable from space, but also privileged over space. The critique of this bifurcation is crucial to the connection I make between the deployment of the metaphor Brown in the 9/11 post-existence. Within this post-existence, time (the moment of the act itself) is a space (which one is identified with or against). More simply, the acts of September 11^th are connected to a well-documented spatially historical subjectivity that precedes 9/11, and while the act itself was temporal—it after all happened on a particular date at a particular time—the post-moment was, and continues to be, a spatially grounded discourse about belonging.

2. This distinction I make between American cultural studies and British cultural studies is important for reasons that I will articulate more fully later on. For now, unless I specifically identify it as different, I am referring to American cultural studies.

3. If my own academic concerns will not suffice to raise this questions, then we can turn to Stuart Hall from a decade ago when he defined Identity as “–operating ‘under erasure’ in the interval between reversal and emergence; an idea that cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key questions cannot be thought at all”(p. 2) [my emphasis].

4. I say this fully recognizing that my own work deals in representation and the deployment of a particular ‘South Asian’ identity within the United States and Britain. Thus, my goal here is not to call for the elimination of such work, but to ask that we recontextualize that work within a broader theoretical understanding of cultural studies, where, it is “more than text or commodity” (Grossberg 1997, p. 248). I justify this call by approaching cultural studies as a way to understand the relationship between culture and power, where cultural studies looks “at culture itself as the site of production and struggle over power, where power is understood not necessarily in the form of domination, but always as an unequal relation of forces, in the interest of particular fractions of the population” (ibid).

5. Foucault says of ‘liberty: “I do not think there is anything that is functionally—by its very nature—absolutely liberating. Liberty is a practice…there may in fact, always be a certain number of projects whose aim is to modify some constraints, to loosen, or even break them, but none of these projects can, simply by its nature, assure that people will have liberty automatically…” (p. 354).

6. I say this because I believe that it is important to understand the significance of this moment and to act on that, and not because I buy into the rather idiotic notion that Cultural studies is not ‘political’ or ‘interventionist’.

7. Here, I am extracting postcolonial theory from cultural studies and approaching Brown as something that has more contemporary manifestations than the historical relationship between crown and colony. I am not saying that this relationship between crown and colony is irrelevant—it would be absurd to do so—but instead, arguing that there are new discourses of power (tied to the historical) that have been long ignored in the more contemporary approaches to Brown. Also, because postcolonial studies has been defined by and through India, its epistemological use for a broader understanding of Brown remains somewhat limited.

8. I'm thinking of slaves brought to the US and Britain, as well as the random division of Africa into ‘countries’ by colonial powers, mainly the English and the French.

9. Here, I am not saying that this is/was an unnecessary project, but rather to outline the history in order to show where we can possibly go forward with and from this important foundation.

10. By referencing to these particular texts I don't mean to say that other significant work didn't exists, but that Hall and Gilroy have been seminal in (re)presenting race in British Cultural studies.

11. More simply, this meant that you were either an expert on American and British racial tensions with a Black Other, or you were an expert on British Postcolonial tensions with a Brown Other. I'm not critiquing these theoretical frameworks, or saying that they are unnecessary. Instead my argument is that if Cultural studies continues to ‘borrow’ from postcolonial studies or Black studies, we are forced to articulate our positions in relation to those areas, rather than through our own understanding of how and what these identities mean to Cultural studies.

12. My thanks to David Monje for working through this terminology with me.

13. For those who critique this statement by immediately saying that ‘Brown’ is not ‘new’, it's existed for millennia is various hybrid forms, the ‘new’ I'm referring to is how this old history has been erased in order to introduce Brown as new.

14. By state, I am using Foucault's notion of such to think broadly through social, political and cultural spaces.

15. I make this argument by building on Hall's eloquent argument that “…because identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse, we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies. Moreover, they emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an identical, naturally constituted unity—an ‘identity’ in its traditional meaning …(p. 4)

16. From Hall, where he refers to suturing as the meeting point between interpellation and the subject position of the Other.

17. This connection between popular political discourse and popular culture was beautifully demonstrated in a recent episode of CBS drama NCIS, where in an attempt to scare a Latino gang into admitting the location of their leader, the Unit creates a connection between the gang and Al-Qaeda. Also, the patriot act, and the powers that it gives the military to do otherwise illegal interrogations, are evoked throughout the show.

18. I have argued elsewhere that Bend it Like Beckham was ultimately about American exceptionalism, rather than the girl power that liberal Americans embraced it for.

19. There are, of course, a number of laws governing immigration to the United States from the early 19^th and 20^th centuries. While they are important, the focus here is on more recent laws that deploy Brown as a ‘new’ threat to the cultural, religious, and economic stability of the United States.