“Our blood is becoming white.” This was a constant lament I heard from siddis in contemporary Hyderabad, India—third- and fourth-generation descendants of East African slaves and soldiers recruited by the local ruler or Nizam in the 1860s to form the African Cavalry Guard in his army. The article explores this siddi lament and the multivalent symbols—of color, blood, affect, belonging—latent in it. It draws on fieldwork conducted over the course of the last decade among siddis in Hyderabad, ambivalently situated as Indian citizens who are racialized as “Black” in an Indian and global order that denigrates Blackness and marked by their religious identification as Muslim in a virulently Hindu nation. The article unpacks these contexts, exploring the forces of empire and region and constructions of race, gender, and religion that have prodded and inflected siddi processes of becoming. In so doing, it unearths the ways in which Blackness, Muslimness, and masculinity are constituted as (intersecting) social and political categories, caught in the dialectics of alienation and intimacy, belonging and otherness, with enduring effects on the lives and cosmologies of siddis in Hyderabad and on the contemporary politics of race, gender, and religion in India.

中文翻译：

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“我们的血液正在变白”：种族、宗教和印度海得拉巴的西迪变身

“我们的血液正在变白。”这是我从当代印度海德拉巴的西迪人那里听到的不断的哀叹——他们是 1860 年代当地统治者或尼扎姆招募的东非奴隶和士兵的第三代和第四代后裔，在他的军队中组建非洲骑兵卫队。本文探讨了这种西迪哀歌以及其中潜藏的多价符号——颜色、血统、情感、归属感。它借鉴了过去十年对海得拉巴西迪人进行的实地调查，他们矛盾地定位为印度公民，在印度和全球秩序中被种族化为“黑人”，这种秩序诋毁黑人，并在恶毒的印度教中以穆斯林的宗教身份为标志。国家。本文解开了这些背景，探讨了帝国和地区的力量以及种族、性别和宗教的建构，这些因素刺激和影响了西迪的形成过程。在此过程中，它揭示了黑人、穆斯林和男性气质被构成（交叉的）社会和政治类别的方式，它们陷入了疏离与亲密、归属与他者的辩证法中，对西迪人的生活和宇宙观产生了持久的影响在海得拉巴以及印度当代种族、性别和宗教政治方面。