Diaspora by Design: Flexible Citizenship and South Asians in U.S. Racial Formations

Abstract

Is the warm reception given Dinesh D’Souza’s writing not in part due to the place he occupies as a member of a “model minority” seen as increasingly important to political conservatives like Phil Gramm? I wonder. I have been equally struck by the fact that under the second Reagan administration, one of the most prominent members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency charged with monitoring and investigating claims of racial discrimination, was Joy Cherian, an Indian immigrant. More recently, I have contemplated the role Pakistani-American M. Ali Raza played (in 1994) in asking California State Attorney Quentin Kopp for an opinion on the affirmative action hiring policies in the California State University system.