This dissertation engages with historical and analytical queries on the corporeal raised by a recent surge of cultural productions whose central figures are South Asian Americans, and their tethering to discourses around citizenship in the United States. Sutured in image cultures, at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, these figurations manifest themselves in novels, short stories, political pamphlets, television programs, beauty pageants, films, and legal cases. This project focuses on the constructions of paradigmatic brown bodies as they appear in historical, legal, and popular representations, from the early twentieth century through the twenty-first century. It examines the ways in which a racialized sexuality is constitutive of these bodies, linking them to specific ethnic communities. It unpacks the anxieties and tensions that are inscribed on brown bodies; they are not new figures, but eruptions and refigurations of past spectacles that haunt the American imaginary. It presents a theory of civilized productivity by examining the ways that power, privilege, sexuality, pleasure, and gender are coded onto this population, and the connections those codes make with discourses around citizenship and nationalism.

Along the way, the dissertation threads seemingly disparate objects of inquiry together through historical and creative contexts. "What Can Brown Do For You?" is an inquiry into the fantasies and realities about the South Asian and South Asian American presence in the United States. The cultural productions surrounding these bodies suggest a fascination with these bodies, coding them as threatening, expendable, and violent, but also mutable, and deeply desirable.