Review: Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World, by Tahseen Shams

Many scholars of immigration and diasporic studies have explored the question of how South Asians have settled and formed communities in North America. As a result, any new monograph on South Asian Americans shoulders the onerous responsibility of justifying its presence in an already crowded subfield. In Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World (2020), Tahseen Shams (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto) compels readers to stop and wonder why a book like this one was not written earlier. Written over the course of five years, the title under review equips readers with innovative ways to interpret and theorize the lived experiences of the community that is central to its analysis—South Asian American Muslims—in the post 9/11 period. As such, transposing its findings to other transnationally sited social formations may also generate profitable yields.The key contribution of this work is the fresh approach it adopts to rethinking the processes of identity-making among immigrant groups. To do so, it foregrounds globality as the paradigmatic scale of analysis in inquiries of immigrant experiences. As Shams observes early on, studies of identity formation among immigrants have long been “constrained within the dyadic homeland-hostland framework” (5). In other words, the question of how immigrants develop their identities has been reduced to one that centers on national belonging in their country of origin (the there) and/or their new national setting (the here). Shams’s intervention enhances this two-dimensional model of understanding immigration narratives by suggesting a third element—the elsewhere—that plays an equally decisive role in the shaping of immigrant selfhoods. The elsewhere refers to global locations beyond those of the home and hostland that influence not only how immigrants perceive themselves, but also how they are perceived by others (3). While an immigrant may neither come from nor have any intention of traveling to the elsewhere, their investment in happenings over there bears resoundingly affective properties. Consequently, global events that occur in these faraway places have spillover outcomes in the lives of immigrants. Shams uses this information to demonstrate that immigrant identities are produced through interconnections between the here, there, and elsewhere. The author labels these three sites as linked as part of a multicentered relational framework (3). In the case studies that her project explores, the “elsewhere” site is alternately the Middle East itself, or European countries that have significant Muslim populations. Hence, an ISIS attack in France is as relevant to the life of a Bangladeshi Muslim residing in New York as would be news of violence occurring in Dhaka in the aftermath of Bangladeshi national elections.Shams compares the repercussions of elsewhere-affairs on immigrant lives to an exogenous shock, a concept that she borrows from economics. In that discipline, the term refers to unanticipated events with origins that are external to an economic model, but that “nonetheless affect the overall system, either positively or negatively” (36). The author writes that unexpected events that originate in “a foreign place outside the state’s borders…[nonetheless have] impacted society within the state by disrupting the larger international order” (36–37). She supplies a concrete example of this phenomenon by recounting the impact of Boko Haram activities in Nigeria on her own South Asian Muslim interlocutors in Southern California. While most of them knew very little about Nigeria and were unaware of its relationship with either the United States or their homelands, its association with a group affiliated with globalized Islamist terror networks provoked concerns that their already-stigmatized religious identities as Muslims could come under increased scrutiny. Hence, a seemingly distant event can have immediate consequences for immigrants such as those featured in Shams’s study and can be used to amplify divisions between themselves and the natives of their hostland.Distributed over seven chapters, the book’s main findings are based on data gathered in Los Angeles—home to one of the highest concentrations of South Asian Americans—during a three-year period while the author pursued her graduate studies in sociology at UCLA. Born and raised in Bangladesh, Shams has fluent command of Bangla, Urdu, and Hindi, all of which allow her to conduct at least sixty in-depth interviews with a wide range of participants. These testimonies are supplemented by her astute ethnographic observations, content analyses of social media posts, and assessments of organizational documents produced by various Muslim American institutions (24–25). Shams lays out the book’s main arguments and delivers abbreviated vignettes of her experiences conducting fieldwork in Chapter 1. Aside from enumerating some of the key challenges ethnographers encounter during their professional forays, the latter accounts are particularly helpful in animating Shams’s personal investment in the goals that this work wishes to accomplish. Chapter 2 sets up the intellectual context for readers to unpack the multicentered relational framework. Here, the author situates her project within the broader literature of immigration studies and details the mechanisms that transform “anywheres” into “elsewheres” (36–38). Chapters 3 through 5 provide an empirical structure to the multicentered relational framework by describing the global ties of some of Shams’s interlocutors. These descriptions enable readers to trace the connections between the religious and social dynamics in South Asian homelands, North American hostlands, and globally dispersed elsewheres. Chapter 6 explores the concept of the elsewhere in greater depth, paying close attention to the question of why some parts of the world are more salient to immigrant identities than others. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses the book’s limitations and offers a roadmap for future research directions.All in all, Shams presents readers with a monograph that capably challenges existing paradigms for interpreting patterns of migration, transnationalism, and globalization. Written in refreshingly accessible prose, the book’s arguments are solid and backed by sensitively conducted primary research and rigorous analyses of secondary sources. Its subject matter is certain to attract a diverse medley of scholars and nonspecialists alike. Assuredly, it will become a standard reading for undergraduate classes and seminars addressing immigration and diasporic religious communities.