Outsider Orbits: Disavowal and Dissent in the United States

Pavithra Prasad

QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 2017,

pp. 100-107 (Article)

Published by Michigan State University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/668597

Access provided by University of California , Santa Barbara (6 Sep 2017 19:49 GMT)
((( F ORU M

Outsider Orbits: Disavowal and

Dissent in the United States
Pavithra Prasad

Over the past year, I had been thinking about what it meant to be a queer South
Asian immigrant in the United States. I would become eligible for citizenship
in the coming year. I thought about how it would not come soon enough for
me to register as a voter. I thought about how at the juncture of my 17th year in
the United States, I was just as much non-­American as I was non-­Indian, having
left my country at the age of 17. I thought about how I hadn’t, ever, and couldn’t
now, vote even there.
As the presidential election unfolded, I thought about how badly I wanted
my vote, and how my vote against xenophobia would also mean a vote
against the Hindu nationalist rhetoric of ethnic and religious supremacy that
informs the current political climate in India and a small but influential segment
of the Indian diaspora in the United States. My vote would mean one more
step towards realigning Indian American relationality as oppositional to white-
ness, not as a chamcha, with a sycophantic longing for approval from whiteness,
but becoming minoritarian and racialized alongside other communities of color.
W. E. B. Du Bois once lamented, “India has also had temptation to stand apart
from the darker peoples and seek her affinities among whites. She has long
wished to regard herself as Aryan, rather than ‘colored’ and to think of her-
self as much nearer physically and spiritually to Germany and England than to
Africa, China or the South Seas. And yet, the history of the modern world shows

Copyright © 2017 Michigan State University. Pavithra Prasad, “Outsider Orbits: Disavowal and Dissent
in the United States,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 4.2 (2017): 100–107. ISSN 2327-1574.
All rights reserved.
 Outsider Orbits  ) 101

the futility of this thought.”1 Maria Lugones takes up the illumination of what
Du Bois names “the history of the modern world” as coloniality itself; a condi-
tion of subjectivity that frames indigenous people, black people, queer people,
and women as already outside the realm of the human, and consequently outside
the realm of citizenship. Operating within the constructs of coloniality involves
a process of legitimizing one’s humanity/citizenship against the nonhumanity/
noncitizenship of others.2 It is no surprise then that anti-­black, anti-­migrant,
and homophobic sensibilities inform orientations towards citizenship within
many communities of color.
Take, for instance, recent public discourse around the most visible elements of
South Asian American involvement in U.S. politics and diasporic perspectives on
what it means to be desi (South Asian) in neoliberal frameworks of citizenship.
From Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal to the “Indian-­Americans for Trump 2016”
PAC, the emergent visibility of South Asia in U.S. politics has taken a decidedly
conservative turn in reframing this diasporic community as a model minority at
the expense of other brown bodies. The South Asian orientation towards whiteness
that Du Bois bemoaned, has not fully been revised, manifesting as anti-­Muslim
and pro-­Trump sentiment in Hindu nationalist India and the diaspora. In a recent
essay, anthropologist Stanley Thangaraj describes an October 2016 fundraiser for
the Trump campaign organized by the Republican Hindu Coalition in New Jersey.
The event combined Bollywood dance performances with the discourse of the
“global war on terror” to showcase Hindu Americans as the “good” south Asian
American community in opposition to the dangerous Muslims. The audience
members arrived and had a seat on chairs adorned with signs saying “Trump for
Hindu Americans” and “Trump Great for India.” During one particular skit, when
the Hindu characters are attacked by terrorist caricatures (read as Muslim), US
“soldiers” (Hindu Americans dressed in combat gear) show up to rescue them
with the Stars and Stripes flying the background. Soon thereafter the US national
anthem is played.3

Images from this event also showcase placards that promised “Faster Green-
cards under Trump” and “Make India Great Again,” giving a face to the ten-
uous promises of riches of the Modi–­Trump coalition, which stem from the
Islamophobic definitions of citizenship by two powerful nation-­states. This
discursive and political theatre of loyalty between the two countries is not
without its detractors, however, it remains just outside the reach of criticism
in order to operate, often to the detriment of its adherents. Increasing attacks
on and killings of South Asian men in the United States, reveal just how use-
less that loyalty is in protecting brown bodies from being persecuted under
Islamophobic ideology.
102  (  Pavithra Prasad

In my own experience, relationality with other Indians has never come easily.
Assimilating to an ideal of Indianness often involves erasing my Tamil identity
in the face of North Indian hegemony in the diaspora. Diasporic pathways to
citizenship are also frequently wrought through heteronormative familial ties,
ties which have been complicated for me, both in India as well as in the United
States, as a queer identified woman.4 It is only among other queer people of
color that I feel somewhat legible as a racial and sexual minority noncitizen.
I am forever at the threshold of minoritarian politics in the United States—­as
an English speaking, formerly upper-­middle-­class, immigrant academic from
India, I know I am neither a strange presence in academia (since South Asian
immigration since 1965 has significantly been tied to the professional class and
the university), neither can I fully occupy the disciplinary spaces made for South
Asian academics in the Western academy. My work on club cultures, night-
life, and the performance of whiteness in neoliberal India is often a rude party
crasher into perceptions of what I probably study as a South Asian performance
studies scholar. As a brown, queer, atheist Tamil woman, I am consistently on
the margins of South Asian practices of communality in diaspora. Bhagavan,
Bhangra, Bollywood, Baaraats are just as alienating as assumptions of heteronor-
mativity that follow my unmarked queerness. I operate as an outsider within
systems that extend privileges to me. I operate as an outsider within communi-
ties (even queer) in which my belonging is often questioned or made invisible.
So, what makes up my community and for whom do I work? I find myself
increasingly working for those alienated by the ideologies, representations, and
practices that are purported to empower and organize us. Through a sense of
unbelonging, people like myself who exist on the margins of experiential race,
class, nationality, and sexuality tend to find community with other outsiders.
Rather than understanding the outsider as an essentially egotistical position, I
offer that the discursive effacement of self, could in fact lead to rhizomatic and
virally proliferating organizing in this moment of crisis.
Although intersectional identity must remain at the core of how we orga-
nize, mobilize, and resist the erasure of difference, it must contend with the
fact that it does not keep us bound to each other in a sustainable manner.
The critiques and defenses of white feminism at Women’s Marches across the
United States stand testament to the erasure of intersectional logic even under
the best of intentions. We are repeatedly told to mask our differences if we
must mobilize against totalitarianism; that we must fight autocracy with cohe-
sion, political coups with democratic citizenship. But in the weeks that followed
the presidential inauguration, we saw something quite different from cohesion.
We saw protests against Muslim and national profiling at airports, we saw stu-
dents railing against a white supremacist speaker at UC-­Berkeley, we saw people
 Outsider Orbits  ) 103

preparing for resistance against discriminatory policies of religious freedom that

will be used against GLBTQ citizens. We saw, in short, a necessary fragment-
ing of our shared interests in opposing this administration that seeks exactly
this outcome. What the white supremacist presidency aims for is a destabilizing
of our collective resistance by weaponizing our intersectional identities against
us. What they (and we) may not guess is just how effectively a fragmented oppo-
sition can work, rhizomtaically attending to the endless offenses lobbed onto our
various communities, moving between them as needed, trusting our numbers to
grow even as we reject a homogenizing identitarianism. We are not all women, we
are not all immigrants, we are not all queer, but we will show up for women, for
citizens, for queers. And we will show up as those who reject belonging to a
culture that advocates pogromatic national progress. At the crossroads of
intersectionality, perhaps the most recuperative stance to occupy is that of the
outsider—­choosing transience instead of belonging, orbits instead of homes. I
argue that the outsider is uniquely positioned to advocate for others and not
for herself, understanding collectivity through individuated accountability and
alienation. So that working for justice always means working for justice for
someone else.
Given these conditions, we might approach queer citizenship as a dead proj-
ect, in as much as it does not guarantee our rights, safety, or freedoms within the
confines of the state. Instead, I brashly stumble forward on a path through the
undercommons paved by an empowered alienation from country and ideology.
Taking a cue from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten,5 we might consider the
impossibility of citizenship as possessable by those who oppose the mechanism
by which that very subjectivity emerges. What takes the place of a citizenry
could be certain constellations of dissent, which include in various and changing
iterations, all of us who disavow the nation-­state that classifies through mecha-
nisms of belonging.
In place of the citizen, I position the queer outsider as an antidote to the
dichotomy of citizen/immigrant. Those outside of the realm of “humanness”
must (and already) function as orbital entities that serve as lightning rods for the
debates of citizens. Thus, one mode of queer resistance in these times demands
that we recognize the position of the outsider as precious and worthy of protec-
tion. Queer of color communities have demonstrated this strategy by rallying
for precarious queer bodies, rather than demanding they legitimize their insider
status by way of sexual behavior or gender presentation.
I evoke the term “outsider” to signal a cultural position, as a form of citi-
zenship conceived outside of the norms of legislation, immigration status, or
political participation, and which reveals a much more complex ethnoscape of
relationality through our unique experiences of alienation under coloniality.
104  (  Pavithra Prasad

I weep for instance, at the prospect of applying for legal citizenship under a
neofascist regime of xenophobia and increased scrutiny. But, should the duty
of the dissenting outsider be to cross into the sphere of inclusion to disman-
tle it? I can’t begin to presume to have the answers, but when I bear witness
to countless undocumented students expressing their fear and anxiety, I am
forced instead to ask how their (and to lesser degree, my own) precarity serves
as a call to (non)participatory action. What emerges in this moment then
is a politics of disavowal as a form of citizenship. Acts of protest against the
state by those on the “inside” must be mobilized as a deactivation of their
privilege as citizens. This view is not intended to excuse nonparticipation in
the rights of citizenship that led to this catastrophe in the first place, rather to
ask allies and legal citizens to consider their sense of cultural belonging condi-
tional upon the justice afforded to all people living in relationship to the state.
Can the white ally, for instance, commit to feeling the weight of alienation
from our movements? Can South Asian immigrants commit to the disavowal
of white approval, and bear the weight of brown queer alienation? In a time of
necessary divisiveness, mobilizing around protecting precarious cultural citi-
zens, and embracing collective marginality across identifications, can serve as
the locus of radical political action.

) ) )  Citizen/Outsider
It has become clear that as a noncitizen, the only option I have in terms of
participating in a democracy in which I have no guaranteed rights is to actively
participate in a politics of disavowal. This is not my president. This is not my
country. India is not my homeland. Desi does not necessarily define my com-
munity. Reproducing the familiar narrative of alienation and desire that marks
the scholarship on diasporic belonging is not what I intend to do here. Import-
ant scholarship already exists on the multiplicity of these experiences and shows
us all too clearly that nostalgic heteronormative narratives of home and away
are woven through with invisible threads of queer impossibility, interracial inti-
macies, anti-­racist solidarities, and counternationalist postcoloniality. Rather
than claiming disavowal as a form of disengagement, I propose that the un-­
situatedness of the citizen or noncitizen “outsider” can be positioned to disrupt
the norming of racial, sexual, and political difference in public discourse. The
precarity of the outsider, although terrifying to those who occupy that position,
could be a powerful stance from which to reorient public discourse towards
justice in a climate where the engulfing of intersectional activism by mainstream
 Outsider Orbits  ) 105

protest practice is not only apparent, but dangerously reproduces the conditions
of oppression generated by white supremacy.
Patricia Hill Collins’s work on the outsider within reminds us that the
position of invisibility affords marginal bodies a view on the paradigms
of power that organize relationality in an unequal society. She writes, “Out-
siders within, occupy a special place—­they become different people, and their
difference sensitizes them to patterns that may be more difficult for estab-
lished [sociological] insiders to see.”6 Although Collins advocates for oper-
ating within dominant structures of power and working to illuminate its
fallacies, the outsider I evoke owes a debt to Rosi Braidotti’s illumination of
nomadic sensibility7 as one that wanders across realms of identification, and
purposefully orbits the core of power in order to connect with the multiplicity
of orbits already taking place around it. It is outsiderness with a purpose, a
collectivity around affect rather than identity. Likewise, Chela Sandoval wrote
about the reality of the differential oppositional consciousness of third-­world
feminists, who necessarily shift between strategic positions that enable specific
political actions, by sublimating a need for static belonging within one or
another of our collectives. She writes, “Differential consciousness permits the
practitioner to choose tactical positions, that is, to self-­consciously break and
reform ties to ideology, activities which are imperative for the psychological
and political practices that permit the achievement of coalition across differ-
ences.”8 In the face of a global rise in political and cultural authoritarianism,
strategies of collectivity have failed when political dissent attempts to mobi-
lize around inclusivity rather than alienation, around “shared vision” rather
than “shared illegibility.” This is not to blindly critique or rationalize failed
collectivity but rather to offer a way forward for radical progressive politics in
the current climate of liberal disciplining, tone-­policing, and erasure. To dis-
avow is not to disengage. Rather disavowal refocuses collective dissent around
affects of otherness, outsiderness, and alienation. It is inherently a position of
pacifist action that is informed by affects of rage, contempt, pessimism, and
noncooperation. Being in these affects together, grounds outsider activism
not around common goals, experiences, beliefs, but around common affects
of precarity.9
This is, therefore, a call to mobilize around alienation. In a global moment
where our identities are being weaponized against us, our most direct action is
to embrace a collectivity around whom we serve, rather than who we are. This
is already happening in various ways, in airports, in city centers across the world,
in our diverse religious and political communities, and interconnected networks
of labor. This is a call to imagine our collectivity as a temporary and responsive
relationality that winks in and out of existence, whenever and wherever it is most
106  (  Pavithra Prasad

needed. Collectivity looks like nice white ladies showing up at the next Black
Lives Matter rally and remaining on the margins; it looks like citizens showing
up at immigrant marches without claiming that we are all immigrants; it looks
like feminists protecting the rights and dignities of sex workers without needing
to save them; it looks like straight allies standing vigil with queer and trans folk
without needing to be recognized; it looks like acting for and with communities
to which you may never belong. It is accepting that we do not belong to each
other. This is a call, not to take back a country, but to dismantle and relaunch it
into orbit around a multitude of outsider trajectories that morph, coalesce, and
disband in response to each other.

n ot e s
1. W. E. B. Du Bois, “India,” in W. E. B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color
Line, eds. Bill V. Mullen and Cathryn Watson (Jackson, MS: University Press of
Mississippi, 2005), 7.
2. María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (2010): 742–­59.
3. Stanley Thangaraj, “Many Hindus Saw Themselves as Aryans and Backed Nazis.
Does that explain their support for Donald Trump?” Quartz India, Febru-
ary  2, 2017, accessed February  2, 2017, https://​qz​.com/​901244/​many​-­­hindus​-­­saw​
-­­themselves​-­­as​-­­aryans​-­­and​-­­backed​-­­nazis​-­­does​-­­that​-­­explain​-­­hindutvas​-­­support​-­­for​
-­­donald​-­­trump/.
4. In the case of “Indianness” as an insider identity, the entitled sense of belonging to
the culture is legally extended to anyone with a (hetero)familial tie to India; one can
acquire a certificate acknowledging them as a Person of Indian Origin (PIO) by way
of marriage, adoption, or reproduction, where only the specifically heteronormative
configurations of these relations are recognized by the Indian state. The gaps left by
these forms of inclusion present opportunities for radical/queer outsider politics to
disavow belonging because it is defined through nationalist ideology.
5. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black
Study (Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013).
6. Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Signif-
icance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33, no. 6 (1986): S29.
7. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contempo-
rary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
8. Chela Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of
Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders 10 (1991): 15.
9. Tavia Nyong’o clarifies resistance to hegemonic frameworks of relationality (here
invoked as citizenship), as a “precarity that is instead more concerned with com-
passion, with co-­passion, co-­presence, a being in common with that which we do
not know, and with those whom we can not speak for.” Tavia Nyong’o, “Situating
 Outsider Orbits  ) 107

Precarity between the Body and the Commons,” Women and Performance 23, no. 2
(2013): 157–­61.

)))
Pavithra Prasad is assistant professor in the Department of Communication
Studies at California State University, Northridge. She holds a PhD in Perfor-
mance Studies from Northwestern University. Her interdisciplinary research
engages ethnographic methodology, critical race theory, and postcolonial stud-
ies to focus on transgressive expressive cultures in contemporary South Asia.
Her work on the racial politics of electronic dance music tourism in India has
appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, Ecumenica, and Critical Arts. Her
creative work, as a writer and performer, explores futurist identity, the post­
colonial imagination, and popular music performance. She co-directs the Per-
formance Ensemble at CSUN.