Remembering Thind

Abstract

As United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind becomes an important site of collective memory and identity formation, the hundred-year anniversary of the decision presents itself as an occasion for critical reflection about how we make sense of this particular past, our identification within it, and its relevance to our contemporary moment. Thind has been read primarily as a case about the racial identification of Indians in the United States and their racialized exclusion from citizenship. This essay explores some of the limits of that framing, arguing that it tends to reify legal constructions of racial difference while obscuring the imperial dimensions of the case, namely Thind’s involvement with the transnational anticolonial Ghadar movement. Moreover, to remember the case as primarily one about racial injury consigns us to liberal frameworks of rights and recognition and to recapitulating nationalist narratives of racialized exclusion and earned inclusion, leaving unexamined the role that neoliberal immigration policies have played in conditioning Asian migration since the 1960s. Rather than continuously retrace the racial wounds inflicted by Thind, the memorialization of the case might focus on the continuing relevance of the anticolonial and anticapitalism movements that so excited the political imagination of Thind and his contemporaries. Such radical remembering might enable us to disrupt imposed forms of racial identity, as well as the liberal frameworks within which they are embedded, to rehearse the kinds of collaboration needed to confront ongoing crisis of colonial capitalism.