The Racialised Counterpublics of Transmigration: Cruel Optimism, Postcolonial Commons and a Theory of Reparation

The discourse of racism dominated by a binary logic of white supremacy and black oppression has historically enfeebled resistance to anti-Asian racism. COVID-19 opened up new discourses about the escalating vulnerability of the Chinese community amidst racist ideologies of the ‘yellow peril’ and the ‘Chinese virus’. South Asians are in a unique situation in this conversation about Asians in the USA; they are not even considered Asians. Against this backdrop, this essay turns to another history of anti-Asian racism, marked by ideologies of the ‘brown peril’ of Islamophobia at a specific moment during post-9/11, post-Cold War American hegemony. It engages with the brown Asian in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a historicised analytic for illuminating differential racisms in the USA. Situating this moment against a longer history of resistance to Asian migration in the USA, this article argues for declining hospitality as a frame to perceive transmigration, and theorises racialised transmigration from South Asia to the metropoles as a demand for reparation that the north owes for past and continuing imperial devastation of South Asia. Against the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and its antecedent British and US imperial history in South Asia, the article examines the possibility of reading Hamid’s novel as transnational counterpublics for exploring wider questions about ethnoracial responsibility and relationality in a world strangled by American corporatism and militarism. Rita Felski’s conceptualisation of feminist counterpublics and context as well as Lauren Berlant’s frames of ‘cruel optimism’ and ‘commons’ offer valuable insights for thinking with the postcolonial detritus left by imperial formations that Hamid’s novel portrays. Deploying a revisionary reading of Derrida’s limits of hospitality allows for a radical global south pedagogy of reparative justice. This is also a pedagogy of relationality rather than one of capital ‐ a responsibility that comes with ‘exiting America’ to defy the lures of the American Dream and to refuse to be an agent of empire, as Hamid’s protagonist does. The article finally turns to Stuart Hall’s concepts of ‘conjuncture’ and ‘contingency’ and David Scott’s Irreparable Evil to think about the afterlife of the text in our contemporary moment as it concludes with the tariff war with India and what that means for a ‘postcolonial commons’, American exceptionalism and a theory of reparations.