“But that was before 9/11”: The work of memory in Neesha Meminger’s Shine, Coconut Moon

This essay analyzes Shine, Coconut Moon’s (2009) delineation of the post-9/11 resurgence of racial anxieties in the perception of the turbaned Sikh male with the intent of highlighting how the present affects our engagements with unfinished pasts. In directing critical attention to the reactivation of Orientalist frames differentiating between minoritized subjects in post-9/11 United States and the racialization of minoritized subjects as …