Citizenship and dissent: South Asian Muslim youth in the US after 9/11

摘要

This essay focuses on issues of dissent and citizenship for South Asian Muslim immigrant youth after 9/11 as they intersect with questions of youth culture and cultural consumption and are inflected by class and gender. Everyday experiences of national belonging or cultural citizenship for these youth are shaped by US imperial power, and what I call ‘imperial feelings,’ and by the biopolitics of neoliberal capitalism. Based on ethnographic research on a group of working class South Asian immigrants in a US high school, the article explores the expressions of dissenting citizenship of these immigrant youth and their responses to the War on Terror. It discusses the ways in which dissenting citizenship is linked to issues of cultural consumption, cyberculture, and notions of neoliberal citizenship, on the one hand, and the proliferation of gendered notions of dissent and ‘good’ Muslim identity that are marketed and consumed, on the other.