Echoes of Mutiny
Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America
Seema Sohi
Reviews and Awards
"Echoes of Mutiny draws from archives rarely looked at seriously and makes an argument that is deceptively simple. Sohi draws a dialectical connection between Indian anticolonial radicalism in North America with the growth of state repression in the United States and in Canada. As these countries tightened the web against Reds, it pushed many migrants to a much more radical consciousness about their own status in the US and Canada, and as they went in a more radical direction it spurred the states of this region toward policies of immigration restriction and state surveillance. This Mobius strip of repression-radicalism whipped round and round spinning the migrants toward a more radical position on Indian nationalism than nationalists who remained in British India, and pushing the state to bar migrants from Asia altogether."--Vijay Prashad, author of Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today
"In Echoes of Mutiny, Seema Sohi provides us with an expansive account of the radicalism-and the repression -of a group of Indian anti-imperialists who found a short-lived home in the United States of the early 20th century. While historians of South Asia have often treated these expatriate radicals as a small overseas outpost of the Indian independence movement, Sohi draws on a range of archival evidence to make a bolder argument: that members and associates of the Ghadar party were simultaneously contesting British colonialism and U.S. racialization and exclusion-and that their experiences produced a vision of revolutionary change that was global rather than merely national in its scope...Sohi's work is transnational history at its best: it is as dense, complex, and deeply researched as it is beautifully written."--Vivek Bald, author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America