Friday, March 7th, 2014 Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America

Description

Drawing from his recently published book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), Bald will explore the histories of two little-known groups of South Asian Muslim migrants who came the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The first was a group of small traders of embroidered silks who came to sell their goods on New Jersey’s beach boardwalks in the 1880s and then built a peddler network, rooted in New Orleans, that stretched throughout the U.S. South, the Caribbean and Central America. The second group were workers on British steamships, who began jumping ship in New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia during WWI to escape indenture-like conditions and access factory and restaurant jobs onshore. Bald will trace out these early histories, exploring the ways South Asian migrants navigated both British colonial power and U.S. racialization, segregation, and immigration restrictions – and the ways African American and Puerto Rican communities provided these men with shelter and possibility at the height of the Asian Exclusion era.

Vivek Bald is a writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of the South Asian diaspora. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013) and a co-editor of the collection The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (New York University Press, 2013). His films include Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (1994), Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (2003), and In Search of Bengali Harlem (in production). He is Associate Professor in Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a member of MIT’s recently formed Open Documentary Lab.