My research conceptualizes diasporic identity formation through entangled narratives of racism, nationalism, empire, religion, memory, and trauma – all while centering a liberation theology and praxis.
My dissertation analyzes the shifting subjectivity of the Sikh Punjabi diaspora across empire, specifically the diaspora’s role in constructing borders of whiteness across the colonial map whilst navigating racial precarity. Through semi-structured interviews, archival excavation, discourse analysis, and ethnography, I examine Sikh political projects and claims for the human as they emerge through “the fascism of despair” (Du Bois 1938:12). In particular, I study Sikh community attempts to mobilize the Sikh turban and beard for the benefit of formal and informal modes of inclusion.
This project falls within my larger scholarly commitment to develop sociological histories of colonization that recognize the colonial present in both projects of statecraft and activism. To do so, I engage with Achille Mbembe’s framing of the decolonial question – “through what types of conflicts and negotiations and compromises do we define the all…to whom the earth belongs?” (2020). Rather than rectifying the decolonial question through belonging, however, I grapple with Sikh onto-epistemes in an attempt to push past belonging, or even recognition, as the final frontier. I venture into a new dimension of always-already belonging while forever yearning for liberation through infinite Truth.
A copy of my CV is available for download here (updated 1.2024).
Martialing Race: How Sikh Sovereignty and Imperialism Shape the Nation-State (under contract with Columbia University Press)
Belonging is usually marked through a clear binary: those who are visibly marked as Other are excluded while those who are included reap the benefits through obvious policy, social, and cultural rewards. In Martialing Race, I argue that such a distinction is not as obvious. Troubling the notion of the state as either inclusionary or exclusionary, the manuscript demonstrates how imperialism’s function is to incorporate visibly Other communities through naturalizing their role in military service. Using the case of the US-based Sikh Punjabi diaspora, I contextualize ongoing Asian American racialization and exclusion through the colonial histories of incorporation and the prevalence of these histories in contemporary advocacy projects. For Sikhs, this reflects British colonial constructed martial race categories which fueled much of Sikh imperial recruitment in the late 1800s and 1900s, as well as eventual migration and pathways to citizenship (e.g., Bhagat Singh Thind). Tracing these histories of imperial incorporation from British colonial Punjab to present US Sikh advocacy, the book both offers an analysis of colonially constructed subjectivities and their resonance in the present, while also demonstrating how an engagement with these traces of colonialism can offer new imaginings of Sikh freedom and sovereignty altogether.
Publications
Peer-reviewed journal articles
Kaur, Harleen. 2023. The Im/material, the Intimate, and the Ethnographer: Considering Practices of Ethnography for Racialized Religious Communities. Ethnography. online | PDF
Kaur, Harleen and Katie Byrd, Nadia R. Davis, and Taylor M. Williams. 2023. Small Revolutions: Methodologies of Black Feminist Consciousness-Raising and the Politics of Ordinary Resistance. Feminist Formations. online | PDF
Kaur, Harleen. 2023. Legacies of a Martial Race: Sikh Punjabi Investment and Implication in the Police State. Memory Studies. online | PDF
Kaur, Harleen and prabhdeep singh kehal. 2023. “Epistemic Wounded Attachments: Recovering Definitional Subjectivity through Colonial Libraries.” History & Theory. online | PDF
Kaur, Harleen and Victoria Tran. 2023. “The limits of imperial incorporation: Alternative sociological frameworks to study Asian American subjects.” Sociology Compass e13069. online | PDF
Kaur, Harleen. 2020. “Making Citizenship, Becoming Citizens: How Sikh Punjabis Shaped the Exclusionary Politics of Belonging.” Amerasia Journal 46(1):107-122. online | PDF
Kaur, Harleen and prabhdeep singh kehal. 2020. “Sikhs as Implicated Subjects in the United States: A Reflective Essay (ਵਿਚਾਰ) on Gurmat-Based Interventions in the Movement for Black Lives.” Sikh Research Journal 5(2):68-86. online | PDF
Book chapters
Kaur, Harleen. 2023. “Radical Narrative Traditions: Communal Storytelling as a Praxis for Liberation.” In The Pedagogy of Action: Small Axe Fall Big Tree, edited by Nesha Z. Haniff. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Available here.
Kaur, Harleen and Simran Jeet Singh. 2016. “Guru Nanak and the Foundation of Sikhi.” In Great Events in Religion: An Encyclopedia of Pivotal Events in Religious History, 3 Vols., edited by Florin Curta and Andrew Holt. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio. Available here.
Kaur, Harleen. 2014. “Moving On Forward.” In Her Name Is Kaur: Sikh American Women Write about Love, Courage, and Faith, edited by Meeta Kaur and Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh. Tempe: She Writes Press. Available here.
Presentations
2023
“‘Revolutionary Love Has Freed Me More Times Than One’: Liberation Praxis Imagined by Sikh Youth.” 12th Annual Decolonizing Conference, University of Toronto, November 2023.
“Standing Apart, Building Together: Transnational Feminist Praxes in Decoloniality and Self-Determination.” National Women’s Studies Association, Baltimore, MD, October 2023. [virtual]
2022
“Archival Half-Life: Degeneration and Decay in the Postcolonial Archive.” Social Science History Association annual meeting, Chicago, IL, November 2022.
“Statecraft and Borderwork: Emerging Frontiers of Political and Social Representation in Colonial Punjab.” Social Science History Association annual meeting, Chicago, IL, November 2022.
“‘Revolutionary Love Has Freed Me More Times Than One’: Liberation Praxis Imagined by Sikh Youth.” Society for the Scientific Study of Religion annual meeting, Baltimore, MD, November 2022.
“Imperial Racecraft: a Du Boisian framework of Sikh subjectivity.” Beyond Militarism conference, University of Cambridge, September 2022. [virtual]
“Statecraft and Borderwork: Emerging Frontiers of Political and Social Representation in Colonial Punjab.” Session on Decolonizing the Sociology of Law: Gender, Race, and the Global South, American Sociological Association Annual Conference, Los Angeles, CA, August 2022.
“Saving Empire, Protecting the State: How a British ‘Martial Race’ Legacy Informs Sikh Punjabi Projects of Belonging in the US.” Global Meeting on Law & Society, ISCTE University Institute of Lisbon, July 2022. [virtual]
“The Im/material, the Intimate, and the Ethnographer: Considering Practices of Ethnography for Racialized Religious Communities.” Chicago Ethnography Conference, University of Wisconsin, April 2022. [virtual]
2021
“Intellectual Wounded Attachments: Discursive Repair or Colonial Civilizing?” with prabhdeep singh kehal. Manuscript to be presented at American Association of Religion Annual Conference, November 2021. [virtual]
“Statecraft and Borderwork: Emerging Frontiers of Political and Social Representation in Colonial Punjab.” Manuscript to be workshopped at New Directions in Law and Society: A Graduate Student and Junior Scholar Workshop; Center for Justice, Law, and Societies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, October 2021. [virtual]
“Intellectual Wounded Attachments: Discursive Repair or Colonial Persistence?” with prabhdeep singh kehal. Manuscript to be presented at Thinking at the border: Post- and decolonial theory and epistemic injustice at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, September 2021. [virtual]
“Committing to Abolition: A Decolonial, Anti-Imperial Framework for Asian Diaspora Studies” with Victoria Tran. Manuscript presented at American Sociological Association Annual Conference, August 2021. [virtual]
2020
“Shifting Embodiments of Whiteness: How Sikh Punjabis Solidified the Color Line.” Manuscript presented at Boston University, Junior Scholars Symposium on Race & Ethnicity in Global Perspectives, April 2020. [cancelled due to COVID-19 pandemic]
2019
“The Specter of Khalistan: Hauntings of Nation-State Belonging.” Manuscript presented at Mnemonics Summer School: Memory and Activism, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, September 2019.
“Erasures of Identity Formation: How US Sikhs Use Whiteness for Visibility.” Manuscript presented at Critical Perspectives on Race and Human Rights: Transnational Re-Imaginings, Junior Scholars Workshop, UCLA Law School, March 2019.
2018
“‘Sikh Values are American Values’— How Identity-Based Violence Shapes the Sikh Diaspora.” Manuscript presented at:
Going Global Conference, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, April 2018
Sikholars Conference, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, February 2018