Academic Program: Communication Studies

My dissertation traces the emergence of brownness as a framework to negotiate South Asian Indians as racial others in the U.S. to the early twentieth century. Through a rhetorical criticism of newspapers, legal cases, and films, I argue public discourse about South Asian Indians is shaped by anti-brown logics that demonize them as dangerous deviants. The project nuances approaches to anti-Asian racism (“yellow peril”) by historicizing how a distinct “brown peril” becomes associated with threat.