UCLA

Crossroads of Belonging, Safety, and Sovereignty: Sikh Punjabi Negotiations of Statecraft and Racecraft from Colonial Punjab to Imperial United States interrogates shifting racial subjectivities of the Sikh Punjabi diaspora across empire, specifically asking why and how have U.S. Sikhs mobilized elements of a visibly Othered identity (turban and beard) in service of the state (statecraft) to obtain belonging via whiteness (racecraft)?

Through a transnational, transtemporal analysis of constructed social relations and strategies of governance, I find that Sikh Punjabis have often been at the forefront of constructing borders of whiteness across the colonial map. Key to this construction has been a mobilization of privileged-caste Sikh men’s legacy as a “martial race”, a category crafted by the British Empire to justify disproportionate recruitment of border territory communities by claiming they were biologically and culturally suited for military and police service. Crossroads of Belonging, Safety, and Sovereignty utilizes this case study of Sikh Punjabis from Punjab to the U.S. to construct theories of state-making, governance, and imperialism that take seriously the legitimacy constructed for the state through racecraft. The dissertation thus finds that the state socializes racialized peoples into particular roles and responsibilities as a means to carry forward colonial legacies of limited incorporation by constructing boundaries of inclusion and exclusion on behalf of the nation-state.

Crossroads of Belonging, Safety, and Sovereignty places nearly 500 pages of British administrative documents, accessed in two locations of the Punjab State Archives, in conversation with two dozen in-depth interviews with U.S. Sikh advocacy leaders, discourse analysis of U.S. Sikh non-profits’ advocacy material, six months of focus groups with young Sikh adults from the midwestern U.S., and Sikh community dialogue on Twitter and Instagram. This comparative historical analysis elucidates how British-crafted categories of political governance and social control continue to be mobilized in contemporary Sikh advocacy projects to address hate crime violence and exclusion from racial belonging.