The Paradoxes of Indian American Complicity: On the Racial Sidelines

In The Paradoxes of Indian American Complicity: On the Racial Sidelines, Kavitha Koshy offers a timely exploration of Indian immigrant racialization at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book is a call to action for an anti-racist, decolonial practice among differentially racialized peoples. Through twenty-three in-depth interviews, Koshy captures the unique experience of Indian American racial complicity on the sidelines of race. The findings of the research uncover the paradoxes of claiming the sidelines and deracialized, neoliberal identities, while engaging in racial contestation; benefiting from selective immigration while occupying a racialized-human capital-labor slot in global capitalism; and experiencing racialized otherness through everyday racism, both interpersonal and structural, despite proximity to whiteness. Koshy develops a typology of Indian immigrant racialized subjectivity amid anti-Blackness, whiteness, caste-ness, Islamophobia, forever foreignness, and neoliberal logic. Through a recognition of the varied iterations of racial capital, the book attempts to suture the disconnect between different Indian immigrant cohorts. Through thought-provoking reflections about her own immigrant journey and observations of the US racialized terrain, Koshy locates herself among the narratives of research participants, moving between analysis and reflection throughout the book.