Critique of Archived Life: Toward a Hesitation of Sikh Immigrant Accumulation

Abstract

In 2016, the Pioneering Punjabi Digital Archive (PPDA) went online. Attempting to reveal how the Punjabi community struggled and then thrived in California, the PPDA accumulates narratives of Punjabi American life. Against such models of archival intimacy and recovery, which look to cultivate limitless public access to a knowable and transparent subject while reducing structural precarity to the failure of an exceptional Punjabi, this article hesitates in a vexed archival space without guarantees. Within this hesitation, it explores the traces of untimely lives displaced in creating archival legibility—traces that reveal a different form of being that challenge the additive logic of the PPDA. This hesitation is cultivated through a comparative approach that couples archival and ethnographic research based on articles about Punjabi American life in both the archive and public sphere alongside ethnographic work conducted with Sikh immigrants who work in canneries and the fields. The aim is to pause in the present impasse to consider the nonbecoming of unknown forms—an ethnographic “reaching and ungrasping” in which the future is not fixed as a requirement for thinking, refusing the accumulating demands of narrative sequence that archiving presents.

The limits of imperial incorporation: Alternative sociological frameworks to study Asian American subjects

“…Thus, while casteism and racism operate differently, the two have fused for diasporic south Asians into a global hierarchy of white supremacy and increased casteism (Mooney, 2020; A. Singh, 2014). Newer scholarship disrupts these tropes of assimilated and educated south Asians through the experiences of working‐class south Asians (Mitra, 2020), but most scholarly depictions of Sikh subject formation still place the community within incorporation frameworks of thriving American life (Judge & Brar, 2021). Most contemporary scholarship on US‐based Sikhs falls within three realms: post‐9/11 surveillance and anti‐Sikh hate crimes (Joshi, 2006; Sian, 2017; B. K. Singh, 2019), attempts for recognition within popular culture despite exclusion based on hypervisible markers of Sikh identity (Gibson, 1988; K. D. Hall, 2004), and grappling with ongoing anti‐Sikh violence in Punjab as a diasporic subject (Bhogal, 2011; Devgan, 2018; Thandi, 2014).…”

“…While the “good immigrant” trope is typically studied as a racial project that helps craft the model minority narrative, it also maintains a pro‐state politic, extinguishing insurgent alternatives (Bassett, 2009). For contemporary Sikh Punjabis, this has translated into the wealthiest community members developing advocacy projects for further incorporation into and “protection” by the nation‐state, such as additional hate crime bills, an end to employment discrimination, and, most popularly, arguing for Sikh identity markers as integral to US military uniform policy (Judge & Brar, 2021; Kaur, 2020). Without a clear discussion of the state and its role in extinguishing insurgent Sikh subjects, contemporary scholarship on Sikh Punjabi subjects largely claim amnesia towards the Gadar Party as an origin point of US Sikh history.…”

“…Singh, 2014). Newer scholarship disrupts these tropes of assimilated and educated south Asians through the experiences of working-class south Asians (Mitra, 2020), but most scholarly depictions of Sikh subject formation still place the community within incorporation frameworks of thriving American life (Judge & Brar, 2021). Most contemporary scholarship on US-based Sikhs falls within three realms: post-9/11 surveillance and anti-Sikh hate crimes (Joshi, 2006;Sian, 2017;B.…”