About Kumarini Silva, Ph.D.: Kumarini Silva is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where her research brings together cultural studies, post-colonial theory, and transnational feminisms toward a critique of how nation-states define and manage non-normative identities through processes of identification and regulation.
Dr. Silva is the author of the book Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State and coeditor of the collected volumes Migration, Identity, and Belonging, with Margaret Franz, and Feminist Erasures: Challenging Backlash Culture, with Kaitlynn Mendes. Her essays have appeared in leading journals like Communication and Critical / Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Gender, Place & Culture.
In 2021, Dr. Silva received the Schwab Academic Excellence Award from the Institute of Arts and Humanities at UNC Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. in Communication and Society from the University of Oregon with a Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies, her M.A. in Communication Studies from Miami University, and her B.Sc. in Communication Studies from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Interview Questions
[MastersinCommunications.com] May we begin with an overview of your academic and professional background? How did you become interested in media studies and cultural studies and begin to bring these disciplines into conversation with feminisms and post-colonial thought to critically engage the cultural construction and political regulation of identity?
[Dr. Kumarini Silva] I was not very invested in considering media studies and cultural studies as an area of focus until my M.A. program, where I had a core group of faculty mentors whose research and teaching were focused in these areas. Taking classes from them shaped my interests, and set the foundation for my understanding of the potency of critical theory.
As part of that process, I also started getting a better grasp of my own experiences in the United States as a racialized subject/object, and was able to put the contours and complexities of that identity in conversation with both American settler colonialism and slavery. It also let me understand the ways that colonialism shaped and continued to influence the spaces I had lived in prior to coming to the United States, including Sri Lanka, where I was born and raised until my mid-teens. But the abstract and theoretical became crystalized more with 9/11, when I was in Sri Lanka on fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation.
My dissertation was on social movements and transnational activism, but returning to the United States a week after 9/11 made the processes of identification and regulation enacted by the United States in response far more intimate to me than my dissertation work. Those moments of identification and regulation just continued to grow, so while finishing up my dissertation, I had a concurrent research project going, which I then more fully engaged with once my dissertation was done. It moved that peripheral project on identification and regulation to the center and has shaped my ongoing research interests in the areas you mentioned since then.
[MastersinCommunications.com] For our readers who might be less familiar with these areas of thought, would you introduce us to your engagement with post-colonialism and feminisms? In particular, would you discuss the transnational and decolonial feminist orientation of your work in contrast to what you have critiqued in your writing as “domesticated” or “comfort” feminism?
[Dr. Kumarini Silva] I find feminist scholarship that centers slavery and colonization and their epistemological impact incredibly generative for understanding the ways that capitalism functions through and outside a purely Western context.
This is not to say that I do not continue to appreciate or value Western philosophical traditions that engage in examining the production of structures of power, but for too long their focus has been solely directed toward a form of Western humanism that has marginalized the experiences of large cross sections of populations — peoples across the globe, whose lives and struggles are intimately connected to the West, but are often written out of what is considered “the canon” and treated as inconsequential.
Third World and Black feminist scholars, especially during the 1970s and 80s, produced an incredible body of foundational work that critiqued the ways the “second wave” of feminism was unfolding in the United States. People like Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, June Jordan and the Combahee River Collective [a Black feminist collective founded by Barbara Smith in 1974], just to name a few, were calling out the ways that the popular narratives of that particular moment in American feminist history were so narrowly focused on a normative female experience that centered the lives of middle-class, heterosexual, white women.
When I first talked about comfort feminism following the 2016 United States Presidential Election, I was naming what felt to me like a resurgence of this kind of “one size fits all” feminism of the ‘60s and ‘70s, especially in the ways that the Women’s March in January of 2017 was framed, and even the optics of it. Suddenly white women felt guilty and vulnerable, so protesting seemed like a good thing to do. But those protests should have been organized long before 2017, when Black, Brown, and Indigenous women were fighting for rights and representation, as they still are today.
After that 2016 moment, I felt strongly and still feel that — given the transnational flows of migration and immigration in and through the United States, and given that this is a country built on settler colonialism and slavery — the impact of that presidency was going to be more acutely felt by the people who were not represented at those protests.
Few people were asking why certain groups were being excluded from mainstream protests at the time. It felt like there was a dominant sense that, because we were having this “moment,” it did not matter whether people were left out — that we should just go with it. Those kinds of path-of-least-resistance, low-stakes feminist performances are always around us, and they have a medicinal value for addressing the pathologized anxieties of whiteness. That is what I call comfort feminism. I use the word pathologies here with intent; I refer to a lot of things as pathologies in my research, because I think we are always looking to cure rather than prevent, and that shapes the way our entire socio-political and economic system functions (or dysfunctions!).
[MastersinCommunications.com] In 2016, you published your book Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State, in which you chart the strategies of identification that emerged in the post-9/11 United States to reconstruct “brownness” as both an abject and threatening racial category. Could you discuss the distinction between identity and identification and highlight some of the primary strategies of identification that you map in Brown Threat?
[Dr. Kumarini Silva] In the book, I use the term identification to name the malleable processes enacted by both state and non-state actors to affect the production of cultural identities. These processes work, in so many private and public ways, to construct identity as a stable category, when the fact is that these identification processes are, themselves, articulated to relations of power and constantly changing.
The basic premise of my thesis is that anyone, at any time, can be subject to identification, especially deviant identification, if, what I call in the book, “identificatory vectors” — like class, race, ethnic identity, religion, sex, or sexuality — produce a composite of that person that the state identifies as a threat to normative white, cis-heteropatriarchy. [Note: cis-heteropatriarchy describes how patriarchal systems, which produce a gender hierarchy that positions “men” as dominant over “women,” also rely on a normative view of gender as a binary and connected to assigned biological sex (“cisgender normativity”) and heterosexuality as the natural sexual relationship (“heteronormativity”).]
In 2016, I wrote about how, in the post-9/11 period, a Sikh becomes a “Muslim,” a “Muslim” becomes a “terrorist,” and a “terrorist” becomes a “Brown threat.” This has taken new meaning in more recent years, especially since the Trump presidency, where identification has become so closely tied to white nationalism and patriotism, both as a way of producing white identity, and as a means of identifying those who do not belong and constitute threats.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Have you observed key ways these strategies have intensified, developed, or shifted since 2016?
[Dr. Kumarini Silva] So many of those strategies have intensified. For example, in the chapter “Black in Brown Times,” I make the argument that the shift to identifying terror and terrorists amongst us shifts the focus from long standing, acute, violent, anti-Black policies, and in doing so, makes it seem as if those racial problems no longer exist, except for what were represented at that time as “isolated” incidents like the murder of Trayvon Martin. The reality is that the Brown threat is a distraction from continuing and growing anti-Blackness.
In addition, consider the recent Supreme Court rulings on presidential immunity, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the dismantling of the Chevron Doctrine, alongside increasingly virulent anti-immigration rhetoric from institutional politicians that translates to legislation and policy. All of these impact the most vulnerable populations amongst us and are framed by a desire to ensure the futurity of a white cis-heteropatriarchal nation state.
[MastersinCommunications.com] One important thread of your research is your engagements with affect theory, which you have applied to study the cruelty of contemporary immigration politics, the social anxiety of islamophobia, and the “mundane privilege” involved in pursuing affective practices of “joy” and “self-care” during COVID-19. Could you discuss the importance of affect theory to your work and, in particular, what you think it helps us understand about contemporary cultural politics we might otherwise overlook?
[Dr. Kumarini Silva] For me, affect [as a term that refers to the “structures of feeling” or felt, embodied dimensions of experience that are irreducible to language] is a way to understand the ways that power and violence are felt through social and political conditions in tandem with broader structural or material conditions.
This is not to say that affect exists outside of the structural and material conditions, but that considering structure or materiality alone does not allow us to understand the ways that more spectacular acts like anti-immigration policies have deep connections to more quotidian political practices, like middle-class lamentations over the loss of joy during the COVID-19 pandemic. I find that approaching these conditions through affect allows me to consider the more intricate conditions of our existence and discover connections between different levels of cultural politics.
[MastersinCommunications.com] The perverse uses of “joy” in social and political practices of cruelty have, in particular, emerged as an important focus of your recent research. Would you discuss this critique of how power strategically deploys “joy” as an affect?
[Dr. Kumarini Silva] My current book project is on the relationship between love and cruelty. In the project I argue that we recognize love by the extent of cruelty exerted in the name of that love. It is through that context that I approach joy. I am especially interested in how class and race privilege position our sense of being “owed” joy, and the ways that framing emotion as a “right” allows people to disregard the human cost of that pleasure.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Your most recent book is the collection Migration, Identity, and Belonging: Defining Borders and Boundaries of the Homeland, which you co-edited with Margaret Franz. Would you provide us with some background on the inspiration for this project and its goals? What does this collection tell us about the enduring significance of the “homeland” in a cultural context defined by globalization and forced migration?
[Dr. Kumarini Silva] Maggie [Margaret] Franz and I had been thinking and talking about this project for several years, especially since we found out that we shared a sense of discomfort at the way Benedict Anderson and his notion of imagined communities is used often within media and communication studies to talk about the nation state as an already existing, immutable structure or geography. Our introduction to the edited volume outlines this critique.
The contributors themselves provide incredibly diverse and thoughtful essays that problematize this notion of boundaries and belonging as static, and consider how the nation and homeland emerge from legal, colonial, migrant, and capitalist predilections that challenge the idea of nation as stasis.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Do you have any advice you would give to students interested in critical perspectives in media studies, cultural studies, and research on cultural identity who are considering pursuing a graduate degree in communication?
[Dr. Kumarini Silva] Explore programs that center a critical approach. Once you have selected, applied, and been accepted to the program, enter it with an open mind and an interest in learning rather than having your existing views reinforced.
While I think it is great to have a research area or idea in mind, I think it is also useful to be flexible and be willing to grow, to expand, or even to move beyond or away from the research you thought you wanted to do.
Apply to our Ph.D. program at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill!
Thank you, Dr. Silva, for taking the time to introduce us to your scholarship on identity and identification, your book Brown Threat, your work on affect and the political dimensions of cruelty and joy, and more!
Please note: Our interview series aims to represent the diverse research being pursued by scholars in the field of communication, which is often socially and politically engaged. As a result, all readers may not agree with the views and opinions expressed in this interview, which are independent of the views of MastersinCommunications.com, its parent company, partners, and affiliates.
