Lone Star Muslims: Transnational Lives and the South Asian Experience in Texas by Ahmed Afzal (review)

Abstract

Ahmed Afzal, Lone Star Muslims: Transnational Lives and South Asian Experience in Texas. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 288 pp.Lone Star Muslims is an ethnographic account of everyday lives of Pakistani and Pakistani immigrants in Houston, Texas, during first decade of 21st century. With this research, Afzal joins a body of scholarship on transnationalism that attends to increasingly de- or re-territorialized ways in which immigrant communities negotiate belonging to two or more nation-states. He responds to prevailing scholarly and popular discourses that tend to frame Muslim Americans as a homogenous and monolithic community by engaging a diverse cast of interlocutors whose lives as Pakistanis in Houston vary along lines of class, religion, and sexual orientation. Moreover, although Afzal focuses his attention on Pakistanis in Houston, he turns his attention away from questions about ethnicity and nationality in order to develop a better understanding of how religion-specifically Islam-shapes Pakistani Muslim experience in America.The title of Afzal's monograph, Lone Star Muslims, sets stage for anthropological project that follows. The title's reference to Texas's epithet, the Lone Star State, serves to signify Afzal's commitments not to generalize Pakistani experience in US, but rather to examine particular experience of Pakistani's living in Houston. As such, Afzal's first chapter does not immediately introduce us to his interlocutors. Rather, he foregrounds Pakistani population movements within context of post1965 immigration policy and Houston's emergence as a center of energy industry during early 20th century. The historical overview provided in first chapter paves way for Afzal to illustrate variety of ways in which Pakistanis in Houston have claimed, and continue to claim, space as Houstonians (10).In second chapter, Afzal follows professional trajectories of upwardly mobile, highly skilled Shia Ismailis who work in Houston's corporate sector-many of whom were affected by collapse of Enron during winter of 2001. Afzal interrogates unequal racial regimes and transnational labor flows fostered by post-1965 immigration policy in US. Contrary to popular discourses that ascribe model minority successes in US either in terms of an innate cultural propensity for educational and professional achievement or in terms of communities' whole-hearted embrace of capitalist values, Afzal's interlocutors reveal ways in which Shia Ismailis' educational and professional aspirations are grounded in Ismaili religious ideology and transnational Shia Ismaili networks.The third chapter turns an ethnographic and analytic lens to consumptive and economic processes that undergird Pakistani lives and businesses in Houston. With Pakistani ethnic entrepreneurs and working poor employed in Pakistani ethnic businesses as his chief interlocutors, Afzal makes two important points about quotidian-and transnational-experiences of Pakistanis living in Houston. First, he highlights ways in which South Asian geopolitical realities-such as fractures in South Asian economy along religious lines during 1990s-facilitated mass circulation of Islamic religious commodities and informed contemporary Pakistani consumption practices. Second, Afzal's interest in Houston's Pakistani ethnic economies serves as a site for understanding individual life histories of ethnic entrepreneurs, working class, and working poor, who experience violence and abjection in face of multiple marginalities. Importantly, in face of racism, classism, and Islamophobia, Afzal's interlocutors demonstrate how religion, and an American dream reworked as individual effort and success in service of family rather than self (123), are instruments of agency and resilience in face of oppression and discrimination. …