Apr 8. (4pm) Suchitra Vijayan (Polis Project), Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India (Penguin Random House, 2021). With a novelistic eye for detail, this stunning work of narrative reportage, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along India’s national borders, exposes a crisis of statelessness in India, which strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of people, especially those living in disputed border regions, where places a few miles apart can feel like entirely different countries. It is a call to action that brings us face to face with the brutal legacy of colonialism, state violence, and government corruption. (Troubled National Territories) Discussants: Julie Mostov, Hafsa Kanjwal. In collaboration with South Asia at NYU.

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Suchitra Vijayan is the author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Foreign Policy. A Barrister by training, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which gives legal aid to Iraqi refugees. She is an award-winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a New York-based hybrid research and journalism organization.

Julie Mostov is Dean and Professor of Liberal Studies at NYU. She was previously Senior Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and Professor of Politics at Drexel University. Her recent scholarship is on the politics of national identity, sovereignty, citizenship, and gender and explores the notions of soft-borders and transnational citizenship. Publications related to these themes include her book Soft Borders: Rethinking Sovereignty and Democracy (2008); the co-edited volume, From Gender to Nation (2004, 2002); and book chapters such as “Soft Borders and Transnational Citizens” (2007) and “Nation and Nation-State” (2014).

Hafsa Kanjwal is an Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Lafayette College. Her current book project, Controlling Kashmir: State-building Under Colonial Occupation, focuses on post-Partition state-building in Indian-occupied Kashmir. She has written and spoken on Kashmir for a variety of news outlets including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, and the BBC. Scholarly and Research Interests include South Asia, Kashmir, Islam, Women’s and Gender Studies, Islam in America.

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