GLOBAL ASIA COLLOQUIUM

April 19, 2024. 4-7PM

in 53 Washington Square South (KJCC)  room 701

Food Justice and Urban Change in a Historic Chinese Neighborhood

Valerie Imbruce

Food justice includes the right to food that is culturally appropriate. That right is challenged in immigrant neighborhoods where the participants and spaces of food production, distribution, and consumption are contested. Manhattan’s Chinatown is a prime example of a neighborhood where food is central to its commerce, cultural heritage, and reputation as a tourist destination, yet the number of food distributors, restaurants, and street vendors in this historically low-income community have been declining due to gentrification, xenophobia, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. How do people who make a livelihood through Chinatown’s food system navigate change? Who is advocating for food businesses in Chinatown and what are their goals? The grassroots response to this crisis is a reminder that people have the power to use food to assert the society that they desire, to shape a highly contested urban space, and to claim their right to the city. In this discussion I’d like to consider how the dynamics of cultural and community identity within this neighborhood’s food system have relevance beyond Chinatown and can expand our view of food justice.

Valerie Imbruce is the Director of the Center for Environment and Society and affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and Archeology at Washington College. She is a facilitative leader who takes a collaborative, transdisciplinary approach to research, education, and community engagement. She is the author of From Farm to Canal Street: Chinatown’s Alternative Food Network in the Global Marketplace. A recent essay and first contribution to a cookbook can be found alongside delicious photos and recipes in Made Here, proceeds from which support Send Chinatown Love’s community building efforts. Her research interests include sustainable food systems, interdisciplinary undergraduate education, and more recently research identity. Imbruce received her PhD from the City University of New York Graduate Center and the New York Botanical Garden.

GLOBAL ASIA COLLOQUIUM 

MARCH  8, 2024. 4-7PM

in 53 Washington Square South (KJCC) 701

Sangay Mishra

South Asian American Diaspora:

Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization

Abstract: 

Asian Americans of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other  South Asian ancestry are dramatically challenging the  traditional mainstream view of who counts as Asian American. With their increasingly visible presence among Asian Americans, South Asians have started shaping the contours of Asian American politics and political mobilization in important ways. An important feature of South Asian American mobilization has been the presence of deep internal fractures within the community along the lines of religion, caste, class, and nation of origin among other things.These internal cleavages have a strong diasporic dimension and they have shaped the nature of community mobilizations in the post-9/11 period. At the same time, South Asians have been showing a relatively high level of uniformity in the context of  American electoral politics in terms of their political preferences that are possibly shaped by how South Asians encounter and interpret race and racialization. It is important to underline these  contradictory political impulses within South Asian communities to speculate about their future political trajectories as a diasporic community within the larger umbrella category of  Asian American.

Sangay K Mishra is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Drew University. He specializes in immigrant political incorporation, transnationalism, diaspora, and racial and ethnic politics. His work engages with political participation of South Asian immigrants in the United States as well as countries of origin with a particular focus on immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. He has also been analyzing the experiences of Muslim American communities with law enforcement agencies. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He served as the co-chair of Asian and Pacific American Caucus of the American Political Science Association from 2014-2016. He also served as the chair of the Committee on the Status of Asian Pacific American of the Western Political Science Association.

His book, titled Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2016 and Sage India in 2017. The book was awarded the best book on Asian America (2017) by the American Sociological Association’s section on Asia and Asian America. His current project looks at U.S.-born South Asians and the ways in which they engage with people of color identity.

• March 8: Desis Divided with Sangay Mishra. 
• March 29: Beshara Doumani, Rebuilding Palestine
• April 5: Nepalis of NYC with Sienna Craig
• April 19: Chinatown with Valerie Imbruce
• May 10: Sumangala Damodaran Afroasian Musical Imaginaries 

Feb 11. (12pm) Sanjib Baruah (Bard College), In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (Stanford University Press, 2020) This critical and historical study of India’s troubled relations with this borderland region, shaped by the dynamics of a “frontier,” in its multiple references — migration and settlement, resource extraction, and regional geopolitics – provides nuanced account of this impossibly complicated story, asking how democracy can be sustained, and deepened, in these conditions. (Troubled National Territories) Discussants: Bodhisattva Kar, Nosheen Ali, Lydia Walter. In collaboration with South Asia at NYU. LINK TO MEETING. ………. RECORDING.

Feb 18. (4pm) Aisha Khan (NYU), The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2021). Spanning post-emancipation plantations in the West Indies and present-day England, North America, and Trinidad, this brilliant study focuses on the contested religious practices of obeah and Hosay, which have been racialized, respectively, as “African” and “Indian,” despite the diversity of their participants. Aisha Khan shows in detail how identities formed under colonialism continue to reiterate inequalities as well as reinforce demands for justice and recognition. (Afro-Asia in the Americas) Discussants: Lisa Lowe, Jacqueline N. Brown, Ifeona Fulani, Shobana Shankar. In collaboration with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS). LINK TO MEETING…………. RECORDING.

Feb 25. (12pm) Kasia Paprocki (LSE), Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh (Cornell University Press, 2021) A ground-breaking study of the politics of climate change adaptation, drawing on ethnographic and archival fieldwork, showing how Bangladeshi and global elites ignore the history of landscape transformation and its attendant political conflicts, as development dispossesses the poor from agrarian livelihoods, and outmigration from peasant communities leads to precarious existences in urban centers. (Global Bangladesh) Discussants: Dina Siddiqi, Naveeda Khan, Tariq Omar Ali. In collaboration with South Asia@NYU. LINK TO MEETING……RECORDING

Mar 4. (4pm)  Ismail Fajrie Alatas (NYU), What Is Religious Authority?: Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia (Princeton University Press, 2021). Taking readers from the eighteenth century to today, tracing the movements of Muslim saints and scholars from Yemen to Indonesia, this Anthropologist’s account of how Islamic religious authority is assembled through the unceasing labor of community building in Java shows how religious leaders unite diverse aspects of life and contest differing Muslim perspectives to create distinctly Muslim communities. (The Mobility of Religion) Discussants: Dale Eickelman, Anne Blackburn, Simon Coleman. Co-sponsored by the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, NYU Department of Religious Studies, and the NYU Center for Religion and Media.  LINK TO MEETING…. RECORDING

Mar 11. (10am) Shobana Shankar (Stony Brook), An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (Hurst Publishers, 2021) This groundbreaking intellectual history tackles the controversial question of how Africans and Indians make and unmake their differences. Drawing on archival and oral sources from seven countries, it traces how economic tensions surrounding the Indian diaspora in East and Southern Africa collided with widening Indian networks in West Africa and the Black Atlantic, forcing a racial reckoning over the course of the twentieth century.  Through cultural movements, including Pan-Africanism and popular devotionalism, Africans and Indians made race consciousness, alongside economic cooperation, a moral priority. Yet rising wealth and nationalist amnesia now threaten this postcolonial ethos. (Afro-Asia Interactions) Discussants: Renu Modi, Neelima Jeyachandran, and Meera Venkatachalam. In collaboration with the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora. LINK TO MEETING.  LINK TO RECORDING … YOUTUBE LINK

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. LINK TO MEETING…..RECORDING

Apr 15. (12pm) Neelima Jeychandran (Penn State) A discussion of Verge: Studies in Global Asias 8.1 (Feb-Mar 2022), a special issue on “Indian Ocean Studies, Afro-Asian Affinities,” co-edited by Emmanuel Bruno Jean-Francois (Penn State) & Neelima Jeychandran (Penn State).  This special issue investigates how creative works and aesthetic expressions represent African-Asian affinities in several parts of the Indian Ocean world. Contributions featured in this issue engage with a wide array of objects and practices—including music and dance, poetry and novels, paintings and architectural designs—and consider how they simultaneously capture and shape the imaginary of the Indian Ocean as a space that generates complex definitions of transcultural, translocal, and transnational contacts. (Afro-Asian Interactions) Discussants: Prita Meier and Dilip Menon)  LINK TO MEETING…RECORDING

Apr 22. (12pm) Awam Amkpa  and Gunja Sengupta,  Sojourners, Sultans and ‘Slaves’: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire (University of California Press, forthcoming). In the 19th century, capitalism and empire networked the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds into a global public sphere of contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. This book mines multinational archives to illuminate the Atlantic reverberations of U.S. mercantile projects, “free labor” experiments, and slaveholding in western Indian Ocean societies. It profiles transnational human rights campaigns, shows how discourses of poverty, kinship, and care could be adapted to defend servitude in different parts of the world, and reveals the tenuous boundaries that such discourses shared with Whiggish contractual notions of freedom. An intercontinental cast of empire-builders and émigrés, slavers and reformers, a “cotton queen” and courtesans, and fugitive slaves and concubines offers windows to competing knowledge productions about “slavery in the East,” and prompts reflections on the comparative workings of subaltern agency. (Afro-Asian Interactions) Discussants:  Sarah Khan and Ahmad Sikainga. LINK TO MEETING.  Link to RECORDING

Apr 29 (4pm) Natasha Iskander (NYU). Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2021). An in-depth look at Qatar’s migrant workers and the place of skill in the language of control and power, in Qatar’s booming construction industry, in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup, showing how skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire, and revealing how skill functions as a marker of social difference powerful enough to structure all aspects of social and economic life. (The Global Gulf and Bangladesh). Discussants: Neha Vora and Rachel Sturman. Co-sponsored by the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.  LINK TO MEETING.  RECORDING

Apr 29 (4pm) Natasha Iskander (NYU), Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2021). An in-depth look at Qatar’s migrant workers and the place of skill in the language of control and power, in Qatar’s booming construction industry, in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup, showing how skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire, and revealing how skill functions as a marker of social difference powerful enough to structure all aspects of social and economic life. (The Global Gulf and Bangladesh). Discussants: Neha Vora and Rachel Sturman. Co-sponsored by the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. 

RECORDING

Natasha N. Iskander, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service, conducts research on the relationship between migration and economic development. She looks at the ways that immigration and the movement of people across borders can provide the basis for the creation of new knowledge and of new pathways for political change.  She has published widely on these questions, looking specifically at immigration, skill, economic development, and worker rights. Her first book, Creative State: Forty Years of Migration and Development Policy in Morocco and Mexico (Cornell University Press, ILR imprint, 2010), looked at the ways that migrant workers transformed the economic development policies of their countries of origin. Her forthcoming book, Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st Century Qatar and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2021), examines the use of skill categories to define political personhood, in ways that have become increasingly salient with the hardening borders and the pressures of climate change. 

Neha Vora is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology & Sociology at Lafayette College. Her research and teaching interests include migration, citizenship, higher education, South Asian and Muslim diasporas, gender, liberalism, political economy, and the state, in the Arabian Peninsula region and in the United States. She is the author of Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2013) and Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar (Stanford University Press, 2018). She has also recently published a co-authored book with Ahmed Kanna and Amelie Le Renard, Beyond Exception: New Interpretations of the Arabian Peninsula (Cornell University Press, 2020).

Rachel Sturman is Associate Professor of History & Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. Her work has centered on law, property, and the legal subjecthood of minoritized persons in colonial India and in the indentured labor diaspora, and more recently on urban materiality, labor, and embodied expertise in the city of Mumbai. She is the author of The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law & Women’s Rights (Cambridge, 2012), as well as scholarly articles in Comparative Studies in Society & History, The American Historical Review, and other journals. She is currently writing a monograph on the history of the building construction industry in 20th & 21st century Mumbai.

RECORDING

Apr 22. (12pm) Awam Amkpa and Gunja Sengupta,  Sojourners, Sultans and ‘Slaves’: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire (University of California Press, forthcoming).

RECORDING

In the 19th century, capitalism and empire networked the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds into a global public sphere of contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. This book mines multinational archives to illuminate the Atlantic reverberations of U.S. mercantile projects, “free labor” experiments, and slaveholding in western Indian Ocean societies. It profiles transnational human rights campaigns, shows how discourses of poverty, kinship, and care could be adapted to defend servitude in different parts of the world, and reveals the tenuous boundaries that such discourses shared with Whiggish contractual notions of freedom. An intercontinental cast of empire-builders and émigrés, slavers and reformers, a “cotton queen” and courtesans, and fugitive slaves and concubines offers windows to competing knowledge productions about “slavery in the East,” and prompts reflections on the comparative workings of subaltern agency.

This “Global Asia” session will focus specifically on what Afro-Asian encounters with imperial abolition can tell us about connections between slavery and diaspora. The scope of the book does not extend to extrapolating conclusions about “African” diasporic consciousness in present day South Asia and the Middle East from evidence of these 19thcentury interactions. Nevertheless, it does become possible to reflect on the ways in which Afro-Asian peoples on the margins defined or sought community beyond the boundaries of nations and imperial states on terms that invite comparison with contemporaneous Afro-Atlantic articulations of diaspora. Discussants: Sarah K. Khan and Ahmad Sikainga.

Awam Amkpa is Professor of Drama at New York University and Dean of Arts and Humanities at NYU, Abu Dhabi. He is the author of Theatre and Postcolonial Desires, as well as articles on African diasporas, modernisms in theater, and films of the Black Atlantic. He has curated numerous of photographic exhibitions and film festivals around the world, most recently, “ReSignifications” at Cooper Gallery, Harvard University. He is currently at work on a docufiction on Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s prison memoirs.

Gunja SenGupta is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She has authored the books For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, and From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York; and articles in anthologies as well as journals like the American Historical Review, Journal of Negro (now African American) History, Civil War History, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art among many others.  

Sarah K. Khan is an Artist in Residence at Princeton University, part of Art Hx to address how medicine, art and race informed each other in the British Empire. A two-time Fulbright scholar, Khan employs photography, films, video art, printmaking, maps and writing to simultaneously defy erasure and build archives. Her numerous awards include the Project for Empty Space Feminist Residency, Indigo Arts Alliance, the Boren Chertkov Residency for Labor and Justice at Blue Mountain Center, and the upcoming Baldwin for the Arts and Kohler Arts/Industry Residencies.

Ahmad Sikainga is a Professor of African History at the Ohio State University. His academic interests embrace the study of Africa, the African Diaspora, and the Middle East with a focus on slavery, labor, urban history, and popular culture. The geographical focus of his research is the Sudan, the Nile Valley, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf. His publications include: Sudan Defense Force: Origin and Role, 1925-1955 (1983), Western Bahr al-Ghazal under British Rule, 1898-1956 (1991), Slaves into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in Colonial Sudan (1996), City of Steel and Fire: A Social History of Atbara, Sudan’s Railway Town, 1906-1984 (2002). He co-edited Africa and World War II (Cambridge, 2015), Post-conflict Reconstruction in Africa (2006), and Civil War in the Sudan, 1983-1989 (1993).

RECORDING

Apr 15. (12pm) Neelima Jeychandran (Penn State)  Verge: Studies in Global Asias 8.1 (Feb-Mar 2022), is a special issue on “Indian Ocean Studies, Afro-Asian Affinities,” co-edited by Emmanuel Bruno Jean-Francois (Penn State) & Neelima Jeychandran (Penn State). (Afro-Asia Interactions). This special issue investigates how creative works and aesthetic expressions represent African-Asian affinities in several parts of the Indian Ocean world. Contributions featured in this issue engage with a wide array of objects and practices—including music and dance, poetry and novels, paintings and architectural designs—and consider how they simultaneously capture and shape the imaginary of the Indian Ocean as a space that generates complex definitions of transcultural, translocal, and transnational contacts. Discussants: Dilip Menon and Prita Meier.

RECORDING

Neelima Jeychandran is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Asian Studies and the African Studies Program at the Pennsylvania State University. She works on visual cultures, material heritage, performances, architectures of memory, and spatial (re)fabulation of legacies of slavery and more general trade in West and East Africa and South Asia. She has done extensive fieldwork in southwestern India and has written articles on transoceanic consciousness and African historical landscapes in Kerala and Gujarat. She is the co-convenor of the research group Indian Oceanologies, a multi-campus working group that explores contemporary lives, spaces, and relational practices in the Indian Ocean. She is co-editor of the book Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (2020) and co-editor for the Routledge Series on the Indian Ocean and Trans-Asia. 

Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University, and the author of Poétiques de la violence et récits francophones contemporains (Brill, 2017).  Jean-François’ research and teaching are in the fields of comparative francophonies and postcolonial literatures, with a specific focus on the study of violence, migration and transnational identities, multi-ethnic societies and creolization, island literatures and Indian Ocean studies. He has guest-edited special issues of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and Cultural Dynamics, among others; and has published over thirty book chapters and articles in a variety of journals including the PMLA and the International Journal of Francophone Studies. His current book in progress is an interdisciplinary study of contemporary literary and expressive cultures from the Mascarene Islands, with a particular focus on marine and terraqueous environments as ecological contexts for alternative conceptions of creolization and transoceanic solidarities.

Dilip Menon does research in World Literatures, Cultural History and Cultural Anthropology. His earlier research engaged with issues of caste, socialism and equality in modern India. His ongoing project for the last decade has involved thinking with oceanic histories and epistemologies from the global south. This work has resulted in three edited volumes beginning with Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (Oxford University Press, 2020); a global history of capitalisms from the 10th to the 18th century extending from China, India and SE Asia to the Ottoman, Safavid and Russian empires. Two volumes forthcoming this year are Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South (Routledge, 2022) and Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime (Routledge, 2022). He is also translator from the Malayalam and writes on film, theatre and literature.

Prita Meier is Associate Professor of Art History at NYU. She an Africanist art and architectural historian who looks at visual culture and built space through the lenses of circulation, empire and globalization.  Her areas of research interest are art and architecture of Africa; port cities and visual cultures of the Indian Ocean world; comparative urbanism; the cultural dimension of globalization; modernity in Africa; Islamic arts of Africa; histories of photography in Africa. Her book, Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Indiana University Press, 2016), explores the contested meanings of the built landscape of still-thriving eastern African ports, including Mombasa, Lamu, and Zanzibar. She co-edited World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts across the Indian Ocean (Krannert Art Museum, 2017) with Allyson Purpura.

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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.

RECORDING

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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