The Imperial Optic as Method

• In Event: Toward a Critical Muslim Youth Studies: Conceptual and Empirical Debates and Tensions

Abstract

In this presentation, I discuss the imperial optic as a method through which scholars can broaden their ocular range to study how processes of transnational racailaization as an element of U.S. empire emerge simultaneously across locales and impact Muslim youth lives and aspirations. In the growing field of critical Muslim youth studies, scholars have characterized Muslim youth growing up in the post-2001 U.S. as the “9/11 generation”, to signal the way that young Muslims from grade school through college are “construed as objects of the War on Terror and so [are] especially impacted by the shifts in national culture” (Maira 2017, 1). My work extends this research to show how Muslim college students across two ethnographic contexts, Lahore and New York City, are interpellated into the reality of the so-called “war on terror”. Specifically, I analyze how locale-specific social differences in NYC and Lahore intersect with the geopolitics of counterterrorism in liberal higher education to produce a cultural politics dictated by regimes of imperial value that has far-reaching effects in the intimate lives of Pakistani Muslim students. The ‘imperial optic’ as method emerges from this ethnographic fieldwork (2013-2019) to examined how student experiences in contexts can function as co-occurring indexes of the “racial figure of the Muslim as an object deployed in the system of global white supremacy” (Daulatzai and Rana 2018, xiii). The imperial optic answers calls to “expand what counts as empire” (McGranahan and Collins 2019: 20), by denaturalizing national and cultural borders of difference. Instead the imperial optic requires an attention to globalized political and racial economies of U.S. empire, which includes both the militarism of War and the proliferation of empire through civil institutions such as colleges and universities, while also recognizing the import of national and intra-national categories in shaping who can move, where, and how, i.e. local possibilities of mobility. My approach draws on the work of Clarke and Thomas who argue that studies of race should be considered a global historical context while recognizing that racial theorizing has “explanatory power once it has been established that race operates differently in different contexts” (2006, 2). The “imperial optic” recognizes this global, yet locally specific, history of race and therefore begins with an attention to the specific processes of Muslim youth racialization. This historical process is situated within a 500 year history of European colonialism, while finding emergent manifestations and impact in the last twenty years during the so-called “war on terror.”

Author

• Mariam Durrani, Hamilton College