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Tibetans are often imagined as authentic, pure, and geographically undifferentiated, but Tibetan identity formation is, in fact, varied and deeply inflected by national location and transnational trajectories. In this paper I examine the frictions of encounter between three groups of Tibetans who arrived in the USA around the same time, but who differ in their relationships to the homeland. The numerically dominant group consists of refugees who left Tibet in 1959 and of exiles born in South Asia; second are Tibetans who left Tibet after the 1980s for India and Nepal; and third are those whose routes have taken them from Tibet directly to the United States. Whereas the cultural authority claimed by long-term exiles derives from the notion of preserving tradition outside of Tibet, that of Tibetans from Tibet is based on their embodied knowledge of the actual place of the home- land. Their struggles over authenticity, which play out in everyday practices such as language use and embodied reactions to staged performances of `traditional culture', call for an understanding of diaspora without guarantees. In this paper I use habitus as an analytic for exploring the ways in which identity is inscribed on and read off of bodies, and the political stakes of everyday practices that produce fractures and fault lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with discourses of threat and security deployed by the United States and India after September 11. In the context of the United States these discourses have been used to justify war in Afghanistan and in Iraq and have revolved around the subject of the Muslin male as perpetually dangerous. Eager to support the United States in its war against terror, India echoed the construction of the Muslin male as dangerous, which served to fulfill India's own internal and regional supremacy agendas. Bolstered, therefore, by the emerging discourse of Muslin terrorists, in 2002 the Hindu Right was complicit in orchestrating genocide against Muslims in Gujarat where 2000 Muslims were killed and 150000 Muslims were rendered homeless. Examining these and other incidents, I examine the similarity in discourses of threat and security deployed by the United States and India. I argue that the similarity in discourses emerges because of a particular understanding of time and space. I make two interconnected arguments: first, time and the very understanding and construction of history are distorted, collapsed, and twisted such that revenge for past atrocities and the threat of future ones are used to justify preemptive military action. Second, there is a particular geography to this doctrine of threat and security that is being established by demarcating us against them. This new spatial arrangement is being formed contingent on a particular understanding of time and history as a linear singular narrative and on the creation of political alliances between India, the United States, and Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]