Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11

by Sunaina Marr Maira

In Missing, Sunaina Marr Maira explores how young South Asian Muslim immigrants living in the United States experienced and understood national belonging (or exclusion) at a particular moment in the history of U.S. imperialism: in the years immediately following September 11, 2001. Drawing on ethnographic research in a New England high school, Maira investigates the cultural dimensions of citizenship for South Asian Muslim students and their relationship to the state in the everyday contexts of education, labor, leisure, dissent, betrayal, and loss. The narratives of the mostly working-class youth she focuses on demonstrate how cultural citizenship is produced in school, at home, at work, and in popular culture. Maira examines how young South Asian Muslims made sense of the political and historical forces shaping their lives and developed their own forms of political critique and modes of dissent, which she links both to their experiences following September 11, 2001, and to a longer history of regimes of surveillance and repression in the United States.

Bringing grounded ethnographic analysis to the critique of U.S. empire, Maira teases out the ways that imperial power affects the everyday lives of young immigrants in the United States. She illuminates the paradoxes of national belonging, exclusion, alienation, and political expression facing a generation of Muslim youth coming of age at this particular moment. She also sheds new light on larger questions about civil rights, globalization, and U.S. foreign policy. Maira demonstrates that a particular subjectivity, the "imperial feeling" of the present historical moment, is linked not just to issues of war and terrorism but also to migration and work, popular culture and global media, family and belonging.

Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Hafsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The overall focus of this work is on interrelationships between youth, citizenship and empire. It explores young people’s own understandings of war, global politics, and the state in the everyday social contexts and daily experiences they inhabit, such as school, work, home and youth culture. It examines their relationship to the state in their everyday experiences and the ways in which the imperial state is constructed in this encounter. It primarily focuses on young South Asian Muslim immigrants or second generation youth in Massachusetts and how they express ideas of national belonging and citizenship during the War on Terror, which directly targets their communities and families both domestically and internationally.

I like how Maira inserted herself into the research with a self-reflexive approach to her own story of citizenship as well as the activist approach she took in her research by being involved in issues of civil liberties and immigration in a post-9/11 context. This is an excellent example of "academic activism."