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Abstract
There is a growing literature on gender and feminist theory in the Middle East now. However, there has been little work on Kurdish diasporas and gender in the United States. This article examines how US diasporic Kurdish performances of gender and narrations of gender work to create the figure of the "Kurdish woman." Instead of falling into the trap of Orientalist constructions of womanhood, Kurdish diasporas imagine "Kurdish woman" as a way to challenge nation-state assimilation projects and erasure by practicing identity at the intersections of ethnicity, religion, gender, and race. The category of "woman" becomes an important venue to manage statelessness, create an important archive for Kurds, challenge ongoing colonialism in Kurdistan, and challenge US imperialism. Therefore "Kurdish woman" constitutes an important spatial and historical terrain for Kurdish women and Kurdish men to manage their racialization across national contexts and partake in the racialization of "others." "Woman" is activated in the service of difference as a means to showcase the heterogeneity within Kurdish communities and expound on the relations Kurds in the US diaspora have with nation, religion, history, and resistance.

Utilizing Tyehimba Jess's conception of "double-jointed," the author interprets the Bhagat Singh Thind case in relation to the Takeo Ozawa case as a way to engage spatially and historically. Through such a comparison, the author underscores the importance of comparative racialization in understanding not only the historical legacy of the Thind case but also how it manifests today during times of the "global war on terror," anti-Asian racism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Indigenous dispossession, and ongoing anti-Black racism. Thangaraj writes about these cases while putting it in conversation with parallel cases, histories, and processes in order to make the point that race, as with the Thind case, must be understood through a comparative racialization frame in order to conceptualize social justice and citizenship through the broadest frames.

AbstractThe study of masculinities is a recent growing field in Anthropology. Within this growing subfield, one must be careful to study masculinities within wide circuits of power. By examining masculinities instead of masculinity, I center the social context and multiplicities necessary to ethnographically chart masculinities without falling into the trap of just centering male bodies and only the social practices of men. Masculinities must be understood in relation to colonialism, postcolonialism, imperialism, racism, heterosexism, and heteronormativity. Black feminist theory, women of color feminism, Third World feminism, and queer of color critique provide important theoretical tools in ethnographic research to decipher power and can destabilize singular, hegemonic Western epistemologies about masculinity. Through such a theoretical engagement, I showcase the complexity, multiplicity, and contradictions in the performance of masculinities in the global South, in queer of color communities, in Indigenous communities, and across various institutions in social life.

Influenced by the anthropology of sport, this article examines leisure spaces of sport as critical venues in the formation of South Asian American 'self ' and 'selves' in opposition to, as well as in relation to, various 'Others'. I use ethnographic research conducted with North American Indo-Pak Basketball leagues, primarily in Atlanta, Georgia, to demonstrate how South Asian American masculinity emerges in relation to ideas of 'Blackness'. In addition, participation in Indo-Pak Basketball for South Asian American men allows for creative practices that facilitate the collapse of 'South Asian-ness' and 'American-ness' (Maira, 2002) while contesting dominant paradigms of race and gender. Through analysis of Indo-Pak Basketball and related expressive practices, I illustrate the processes of identity formation and consumption as critical to citizenship in the US national fabric. I also argue that the subversive potential in basketball masculinity and its respective pleasures are limited by its relation to a 'hegemonic masculinity' (Connell, 1995), as well as by the consumptive logic of late capitalism through which racialized, heterosexist, patriarchal formulations of community emerge.

AbstractThe conflating of the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region with Arabs is a common trope that also governs how we study West Asia and West Asian diasporas in the United States. I ethnographically highlight the lives of Kurds in mainly Nashville, Tennessee, and the northeastern United States while foregrounding their racial aspirations that disrupt essentialized depictions of the SWANA region and challenge the nation‐state's racial ascriptions. The use of the "Indo‐European" language family as racial classification in opposition to Arabs, the quotidian practices of racializing Kurds through the "Muslim‐looking" racial formation, and the everyday forms of solidarity with Arab Americans during this period of the global war on terror provide traction on the ways the ascriptions of race and aspirations to race influence Kurdish identity formation. Through evocations of "Indo‐European‐ness," Kurdish Americans conceptualize transnational and transhistorical forms of whiteness/Europeanness/Aryan‐ness and racialized difference from Arabs, offer critiques of nation‐states, and accentuate dynamic forms of racial consciousness. Kurds simultaneously engage with ethnological understandings that are naturalized as racial difference at the very moment they must also manage the racial hysteria post‐9/11. With increased xenophobia and Islamophobia, Kurds challenge their racializations by embracing nonwhiteness that opens possibilities for coalition‐building with Arab Americans and various racial "Others."

Kurdistan and Kurdish diasporas are often conceptualized in singular, essentialized, and monolithic terms. Instead of working through essentializing terms, this article intervenes to insert difference within the category of Kurdish diasporas. By engaging with Lisa Lowe's (1996) conceptualization of "heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity," the article looks at the ways through which Kurdish diasporas differ both in relation to other diasporas and within itself. Instead of foregrounding the dominant and growing literature on Kurdish diasporas in Europe, this article introduces new destination sites for Kurdish diasporas that force us to engage with new epistemologies of difference operating within diasporic communities. In the process, this article challenges the ideas of Kurdish diasporas as a coherent, knoweable object of study and stressed the need to engage with the fluidity of Kurdish diasporas. Finally, this article introduces the articles for this special issue on Kurdish diasporas.

South Asian American participants of a co-ethnic basketball league, known as Indo-Pak Basketball, utilized urban basketball vernacular through the phrase "liting it up" to identify individuals scoring points in great numbers. The person "liting it up" becomes visible and receives recognition. Accordingly, I want to "lite up" the scholarship on South Asian America whereby situating South Asian American religious sites and cultural centers as key arenas for "Americanization" through US popular culture. I situate sport as a key element of popular culture through which South Asian American communities work out, struggle through, and contest notions of self. Informed by an Anthropology of Sport, ethnography of South Asian American communities in Atlanta takes place alongside an examination of the North American Indo-Pak Basketball circuit. Accordingly, my findings indicate that such community formation has also taken shape at the intersections of institutions, gender, and sexuality whereby excluding queers, women, and other communities of color.

South Asian American participants of a co-ethnic basketball league, known as Indo-Pak Basketball, utilized urban basketball vernacular through the phrase "liting it up" to identify individuals scoring points in great numbers. The person "liting it up" becomes visible and receives recognition. Accordingly, I want to "lite up" the scholarship on South Asian America whereby situating South Asian American religious sites and cultural centers as key arenas for "Americanization" through US popular culture. I situate sport as a key element of popular culture through which South Asian American communities work out, struggle through, and contest notions of self. Informed by an Anthropology of Sport, ethnography of South Asian American communities in Atlanta takes place alongside an examination of the North American Indo-Pak Basketball circuit. Accordingly, my findings indicate that such community formation has also taken shape at the intersections of institutions, gender, and sexuality whereby excluding queers, women, and other communities of color.

Rooted in a global, transnational perspective, Athletic Activism: Global Perspectives on Social Transformationdemonstrates how athletic activism can not only impact global discourse about inequity across various social location, but foster institutional change that advances social justice.

Athletes across the globe have engaged in high profile protests against state violence since NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick's refusal to stand during the US national anthem in protest of state violence against Black communities. There is, however, a much longer global history that precedes and follows Kaepernick's protest. This series of sport protests, across both professional and amateur levels, has invigorated progressive politics around the world and drawn attention to ongoing authoritarianism, state violence, and vigilante violence, as well as the role sport can play in both exposing and combatting such issues. Challenging the dominant Global North narrative, Athletic Activism: Global Perspectives on Social Transformation demonstrates how athletic activism can not only impact global discourse about inequity, but also foster institutional change that advances social justice. This volume uses the term 'athletic activism' to understand how athletes, coaches, and sports professionals use sports, sporting institutions, and athletics to engage in conscious, concerted, and sustained efforts to transform the world they inhabit. Borrowing both historical and contemporary approaches to examine grassroots youth sports, quotidian sites of amateur sport, and mega-sporting events, chapters expand on how we conceptualize athletic activism and theorize the transformative potential of sport and sporting participants. Rooting athletic activism in a global, transnational perspective, Athletic Activism: Global Perspectives on Social Transformation broadens the focus on athletic activism from highly publicized, performative forms of protest on the pitch to local grassroots efforts that seek to address issues of race, violence, gender, sexuality, sustainability, identity, and community development.

While leisure, race, and national populism have been minimally linked and theorized in the literature, we take this moment, during the global turn to national populism and conservative regimes, to center leisure and race in the politics of today. While theorizing the link to leisure and national populism, we center how the turn towards ethno-nationalist populism derives from the workings of race, alongside class, caste, and ethnicity, in various global north and global south leisure contexts. We provide an introduction that puts in conversation the realms of leisure (in all its possibilities), race, and the various modes of national populism. Therefore, we provide both the important theoretical foundations to understanding these relationships while offering numerous instances of such shifts to national populism. In particular, we start the conversation with a case of the realm of art, sport, and protest as a way to pull out the extraordinary links to social phenomenon, power, and theory.