Missing is a timely and captivating ethnography of the everyday experiences of Muslim youth from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh living in a New England town in the wake of the attacks of 11 September 2001. Sunaina Maira brings her interlocutors’ stories to life with a focus on questions such as these: “How do you grow up, work, study, play, and fall in love when you know you are, at a particular moment, considered the enemy population of the nation-state in which you live?” “What do you do if you know that your father or brother could one day disappear and be taken from your home, detained in prison, and then sent away on a plane?” “What is the texture of your fear when the state turns its intelligence apparatus on surveilling and documenting your community from Islamabad, Pakistan, to Albany, New York?” (p. 4).

Yet Missing is much more than an ethnography of everyday life; its power lies in the way Maira situates lived experience within the realities of the imperial state and its transnational effects. She employs the term “empire” as a framework for situating the experiences of the youth with whom she worked within the political and cultural shifts related to the war on terror (44). Through the intimate and the everyday, Maira calls on readers to rethink conventional conceptualizations of citizenship, nation, and national belonging in the context of relations between the U.S. empire and India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

The book brings racial theory, youth studies, gender studies, transnational studies, and post-colonial theory into conversation. In this sense, the book expands conventional studies of citizenship from a focus on the law to a focus on the significance of the cultural and the economic to citizenship and to concepts of national belonging and non-belonging. For Maira, her interlocutors' stories reveal the inner workings of the war on terror, including the ways this war operates on a terrain of cultural citizenship, and is infused with racial discourses about the “terrorist threat” and “alien civilizations.” As her interlocutors come up against structural inequalities related to racial profiling, surveillance, and even detention and deportation, Maira illustrates that a legally based notion of citizenship cannot guarantee protection. Her interlocutors' stories also require us to consider how cultural belonging can become wrapped up in the transnational politics of immigrant rights and workers rights in a neoliberal economy. Maira also provides new ways of thinking about fear and political dissent in relation to questions of citizenship, civil liberties, and repression. She argues, for example, that some “forms of dissent represent an engagement with the state, rather than a break from it” (248).

Missing affirms the importance of interdisciplinary theories and methods to scholarship committed to analyzing interconnections between multiple axes of power in a transnational context. Building on the theories and methods of anthropology, ethnic studies, American studies, women's studies, and cultural studies, Missing links everyday life with geopolitics, theorizes how immigration, race, class, and gender permeate one another, and conceptualizes the boundaries between law and culture as fluid and changing. The book also contributes to critical debates on the apparently fraught relations between researcher and subject and between scholars and activists. Indeed, the book appeals to a broad audience—from readers interested in the life stories of South Asian youth or pressing geopolitical issues to scholars and activists committed to racial justice and immigrant rights.