In this paper, I ask how Pakistanis have been interpreting and responding to the post-9/11 construction of Muslim identities, or more broadly, how a transnational community responds when it has been marked as hostile. Looking primarily at two Pakistani community organizations in the technology region known as Silicon Valley in Northern California, I seek to answer this question with evidence from document analysis, participant observation, and in-depth interviews. I argue that the bright boundaries that exclude Pakistanis from acceptance, and which categorize them as a suspicious other, have been a catalyst for community identity construction and management. If assimilation is the decline of an ethnic distinction and its corollary cultural and social differences, then the examination of the ways by which an excluded community seeks to belong can help expose the boundaries of membership that a state erects against immigrant communities. Through such an examination, I have found that the Pakistani community in Silicon Valley has used performative tropes to contest racialized boundaries and to re-define their community (and any of its transnational endeavors or inclinations) as being within acceptable limits. Representations of themselves as “business-developers” and “secular-pluralists” show that their community is sincere about assimilating, and that any transnationalism is within the realm of assistance towards American geopolitical goals. Thus, one of the implications of my research is that a government, its media, and the public can influence an immigrant population to shape itself in ways that are friendly and amenable to (in this case) US ideologies.

My dissertation explores the relationships between states in the age of globalization, and the construction and expression of Pakistani immigrants’ national, ethno-racial, and religious identities at the individual and group levels. It is driven by the question of how we make sense of boundaries and belonging, and I explore the relationship(s) between immigrant communities’ identities and local, state, and global contexts. Concretely, I examine how Pakistani immigrants in the global metropolitan areas of San Francisco, California and Toronto, Ontario construct and participate in various identity communities both within and across borders. I argue that accurate study of global phenomena requires we question the assumptions built into the nation-state system, which overly constrain our analyses and representations of reality. I demonstrate the import of American hegemony, and show how the US and Canada, in their separate and dialectic ways, create visually-identified others. I suggest an analytic framework of the administrative and the affective of the macro and the micro, and apply it to citizenship to comment upon the processes of racial disciplining that structure subjectivities in an increasingly interconnected global society. This dissertation adds to the little discussed question of how race is made across boundaries, shows how states structure subjectivities, and how immigrants’ identity projects are instances of the deterritorialization of the nation-state.