Queering solidarity : South Asian diasporic activism, intimacies, and participation in multiracial social movements

Abstract

This PhD explores the activism, organising, and social movement work of South Asian diasporic individuals in spaces that strive against precaritization and towards Black and Brown liberation across sectors and issues. This activism and this research are located within the contexts of rising antiracist organizing globally in response to the concurrent rising supremacist, fascist, and racially capitalist-motivated state and vigilante violence, and a global pandemic and wars that surface racial capitalist violence against marginalised communities. The dissertation theorises the role of South Asian diasporic individuals within multiracial struggles for justice in South Africa, the US, and the UK, using the lens of “queering solidarity”. This study explores the disproportionate representation of queer, women, trans, and non-binary people, from class- and caste-oppressed or otherwise marginalized South Asian communities who collaborate in multiracial activism and justice work, particularly amidst tensions between South Asian right-wing forces and Black communities. It traces and conceptualises the varied ways that activists practice and envision solidarity within social movements, balancing intra-group concerns with efforts to build cross-racial organisations and united fronts alongside attempts to dismantle privilege through allyship. It analyses a far-reaching set of manifestations of this activism, in South Asian formations like #SouthAsiansforBlackLives, cross-racial coalitions, culture work, and multiracial issue-focused groups organizing for housing justice, student activism, prison abolition, and more. Activists contest with histories of solidarity in movements like Political Blackness in the UK and Black Consciousness in South Africa, where South Asians collaborated as comrades with Black activists, as well as the depoliticizing impact of the model minority myth and enduring colonial hierarchies that mark some (but not all) South Asians as aspirationally white and handmaidens to white supremacist empire. Across these varied patterns of social movement work, this PhD posits that diasporic South Asian activists can be seen as “queering solidarity” through transnational praxis and alternate models of organizing across community boundaries. Queerness, here, creates alternate forms of doing solidarity work across racialised communities by emphasizing shared intimacies and the need for total systems transformation, and by mobilising radical politics alongside such intimacies to dismantle white supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy. By exploring connections such as linking casteism to anti-Blackness, unearthing connections between neoliberal Hindu fascism and white supremacy, combatting the relationships between state-sponsored racialized capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, Hindutva, and white supremacy; and leveraging transnational South Asian diasporic and subcontinental organizing, this study explores how activists build complex webs of queered South Asian diasporic solidarity.