Downwardly Global

"Lalaie Ameeriar's critical examination of multiculturalism offers ethnographic nuance to long existing—and largely theoretical—debates about gender, cultural difference, and the multicultural state. By bringing these debates to life through the everyday lives of the women she interviews, Ameeriar highlights the urgency of these debates, as well as the lessons that we as scholars and citizens have yet to fully learn." - Smitha Radhakrishnan, author of Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class

"As one of the few ethnographies on women from Pakistan, Downwardly Global offers a much-needed counterpoint to North American analyses of diaspora that overwhelmingly privilege the United States. Lalaie Ameeriar assesses the complexity of the role of gender in diasporic and migratory experiences, making a timely intervention into a number of debates and issues, from multiculturalism, the state, and bureaucratic institutions to gender, racialization, and the Pakistani diaspora. An important contribution to South Asian American studies." - Junaid Rana, author of Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora

“Ameeriar’s book echoes an important refrain from diasporic feminist scholars, insisting that despite the various scales at which disenfranchisement and violence function, migrant women resourcefully find ways to persist.” - Kareem Khubchandani, Journal of Asian American Studies

"By focusing on how foreign bodies are deemed illegible in some contexts and legible in others, Ameeriar is able to illustrate how precarity and poverty are not only economic conditions but also affective and sensorial ones." - Anar Parikh, Association for Feminist Anthropology

“Radically subversive, superbly written.” - Pnina Werbner, Pacific Affairs

"This book is very timely and informative about the global processes of movement and social mobility highly sought among migrants in an age where immigration provides a plethora of spaces to advance oneself beyond the confines and limitations in one’s country of origin." - Serah Shani, City & Society

"Of interest to scholars of citizenship and governance, globalization and neoliberalism, gender and embodiment, multiculturalism and race, this book is a rich read for its deployment of analytical concepts and the creation of two new ones: pedagogies of affect and sanitized sensorium." - Alison Shaw, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute