Collective Identity Fissures in Ethnoracial Mobilisation

• In Event: 40420 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 18: The Politics of Social Movements 3

Abstract

Immigrants in the US have long been agitating for dignity and human rights, irrespective of citizenship (Nicholls 2019; Terriquez 2015). An essential component of sustaining a social movement is the development and articulation of collective identity. In the sociology of social movements, theories of collective identity have typically focused on a singular axis of identity. The literature on boundary making also focuses on those drawn between distinct groups. These neat distinctions become complex and difficult to parse when it comes to immigrants who are engaging in political mobilisation, as demonstrated by the literature on South Asian social movements in the US.

In this paper, I demonstrate that immigrants mainly engage in two kinds of transnational movements – movements for inclusion and movements for solidarity. While I do not contend that the boundaries between these two types of movements are sharp all the time, I believe that collective identities developed in these movements do different kinds of work for immigrants. For the purposes of this paper, I delve deeper within the literature on movements for inclusion. I review the existing literature on South Asian social movements in the US and analyse it to uncover three generations of scholarship. While an early generation of scholars analysed South Asian Americans as sharing interests and largely ethnically homogenous with similar mobilisation goals and collective identities, later scholars complicated this approach by demonstrating rifts between right-wing Hindu politics and other forms of South Asian politics. More recently, scholars have shown how critical race theory can enrich the study of South Asian movement identity in the US. This paper traces this literature and shows that a critical understanding of race and caste is crucial to understanding South Asian organising in America as not just a site of minority organising but also of internal oppression. This in turn shows that there are limits to the effectiveness of collective identities generated around a singular ethnoracial status and the literature needs to include learnings from intersectionality and critical race theory.

Author

• Sanchita Dasgupta, Brandeis University