Media

Sabelo Narasimhan reflects on this year's Gay Pride parade in Bombay, India. In the wake of the recent judgement criminalizing homosexuality, the images in this photoessay reveal the unbounded spirit of rebellion and resistance of the community.

A long history of agit prop inspires SAWCC's recent "FreedomSafetyNow" protest against gender-based violence.

Anantha Sudhakar's "Long-Distance Radicalism: In Conversation with SAMAR’s Virtual Editorial Collective," provides a glimpse of SAMAR's volunteer editorial collective, which has sustained the magazine over the past 20 years and contextualizes SAMAR within South Asian Diasporic progressive activism.

In honor of SAMAR's 20th year, we bring you an issue from the past via SAADA, the South Asian American Digital Archives!

Yet the ranks of the Islamophobic phalanx goes beyond the evangelical right and the Tea Party movement. Among their cadre are fixtures of the security establishment, the foreign policy elite and the academy.

Representative Peter King’s (R-NY) first hearing on the radicalization of American Muslim communities exemplified the right wing’s ongoing commitment to constructing the idea of a radical, threatening Islam.  The hearing also exposed what is, at best, liberal acquiescence, and, at worst, liberal partnership in that dangerous agenda.   Most profoundly, the hearing made clear the extent to which the war on terror has robbed public discourse of any meaningful vocabulary for contesting the universe in which Islam poses legitimate concern for the American public.

Both the Arab Spring and Gulf worker actions are, broadly, about dignity and justice; both challenge the status quo of unaccountable family/security-states; and both are met with ferocious responses by those states.  Yet, the Gulf worker actions are ignored. Why?

I have just characterized the killing of our lifetime’s Public Enemy Number 1, as an act of violence. The association is disconcerting. It does not readily compute. But what else does one call an act that requires the raiding of a home, and the shooting of an unarmed man, and others, until they are dead?

The good mutants work in spaces servicing the global economy. The bad ones want to destroy freedom, democracy, free markets. New mutations are arising in the politics of fear and the War on Terror.