Category Archives: Special Events
In Search of Bengali Harlem: Screening & Discussion
The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU is thrilled welcome back Professor Vivek Bald (PhD, NYU American Studies) for a screening of his acclaimed documentary with actor and playwright Alaudin Ullah, In Search of Bengali Harlem (85 min), which follows Ullah as he investigates the lives of his Bangladeshi immigrant parents, unearthing a lost history in which South Asian Muslims, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans forged an extraordinary multiracial community in the tenements of mid-twentieth century Harlem.
The screening will be followed by a discussion, moderated by Professor Dina M. Siddiqi (NYU Liberal Studies), featuring Bald, co-Director Ullah, and community members Yolanda Musawwir and Shahazan Khalique.
Thursday, March 9, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST
Venue: NYU Cantor Film Center, Theater 200
Address: 36 E. 8th Street New York, NY 10003 US
Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. Co-sponsored by the NYC Center for Global Asia, Center for Black Visual Culture at the Institute of African American Affairs, and Asian Film and Media Initiative at the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Accessibility note: This venue has an elevator and is accessible for wheelchair users. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.
Vivek Bald is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, digital media producer, and scholar. His work over the past twenty-five years has explored the stories and experiences of South Asians in the US and Britain. Bald’s first documentary, Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (1994) examined the lives, struggles, and activism of New York City taxi drivers from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Bald’s second film, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (2003) focused on South Asian youth, music, and anti-racist politics in 1970s-90s Britain. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013) and is the faculty Director of MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. He is also developing “The Lost Histories Project,” an interactive documentary and participatory oral history that will build upon and extend the Bengali Harlem film and book. Bald received his PhD in American Studies from NYU in 2009.
Alaudin Ullah is a playwright and actor and the son of one of the first Bengali Muslim men to settle in Harlem. Ullah is the author of the acclaimed one-man show, Dishwasher Dreams, based on his father’s life in New York City in the 1930s-60s. Ullah premiered Dishwasher Dreams at the New Works Now! Festival at New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater, and was subsequently awarded one of the Public Theater’s prestigious Emerging Writers Group Fellowships. Ullah’s three-act play Halal Brothers centers on the interactions between African American and Bengali Muslims in a Harlem halal butcher’s shop on the day of Malcolm X’s murder in 1965. This emotionally charged ensemble drama is in development for stage production.
Dina M. Siddiqi is a cultural anthropologist by training and teaches in the School of Liberal Studies at NYU. Her research, grounded in the study of Bangladesh, joins development studies, transnational feminist theory, and the anthropology of labor and Islam. She has published extensively on the global garment industry, non-state gender justice systems, and the cultural politics of Islam and nationalism in Bangladesh. Siddiqi is on the advisory board of the journals Dialectical Anthropology, Contemporary South Asia, and the Journal of Bangladesh Studies. She is on the Executive Committee of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS) and a member of the Executive Board of Sakhi for South Asian Women. Her publications can be found at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dina-Siddiqi.
Dec 3. On Community Care: A/P/A Voices During COVID-19
Thursday, December 3, 5:30-6:45 p.m. EST
“On Community Care: Documenting A/P/A Voices During COVID-19”
An A/P/A Voices: Public Memory Project Event
Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, New York Center for Global Asia, NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, and Monument Lab.
In Spring 2020, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU developed A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project in collaboration with scholars, artists, and organizers Tomie Arai, Lena Sze, Vivian Truong, and Diane Wong and the NYU Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive. This university-community partnership aims to document the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Asian/Pacific/Americans, and the organizing, mutual aid, and other forms of community care efforts that emerged at the intersection of the resulting public health and economic crises, and a national racial reckoning and movement for Black lives. Thus far, over thirty virtual interviews have been conducted with A/P/A essential workers, students, artists, and community organizers, and dozens of digital artifacts (e.g. flyers, zines, short films, photographs, and more) have been donated by individuals and organizations.
As a way to reflect on the project and the diverse forms of care that A/P/A communities have participated in and established during the pandemic, the A/P/A Institute at NYU presents On Community Care: Documenting A/P/A Voices During COVID-19.
The virtual program will feature remarks about oral history and archiving from Crystal Baik (University of California, Riverside) and Shannon O’Neill (NYU Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives); reflections from A/P/A Voices contributors Lisa Fu (California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative; narrator), Mike Keo (#IAmNotAVirus; artifact donor and narrator), and Loubna Qutami (University of California, Los Angeles; interviewer); screenings of the short films Back to Work by Alexander Catedral (filmmaker; artifact donor) and 100 Miles Apart by Garveaux Sibulboro (filmmaker; artifact donor) that capture the impact of COVID-19 on Filipinx healthcare workers and their families; a panel discussion on community care efforts from Queens to Madison to Seattle with Moumita Ahmed (Queens Mutual Aid Network; narrator), Monyee Chau (artist and activist; artifact donor and narrator), and Kabzuag Vaj (Freedom, Inc.; narrator). The program will end with a reading by Taiyo Na (writer and educator; artifact donor).
Accessibility Note: This event will be hosted virtually on Zoom. A Zoom account, internet access, and a smartphone or computer is required. Closed captioning will be provided for all audio. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu as soon as possible.
Nov 17 Nosheen Ali on Being in Kashmir
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Dec 4 Dipti Khera Art and Place-Making in Rajasthan
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Nov 18, 2020 Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean
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SPECIAL EVENT of interest for Global Asia A BOOK LAUNCH for Aliyah Khan, FAR FROM MECCA: GLOBALIZING THE MUSLIM CARIBBEAN, New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press 2020 (NYU ebook link) (Rutgers Press link) Critical Contemporary Studies Workshop RIW at the University of Michigan for a book talk followed by a Q&A with Professor Aliyah Khan:
Wednesday, November 18th at 12pm
RSVP at this link for a Zoom invite. Far from Mecca is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry, and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis, Khan argues for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean. Case studies explored range from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth-century Jamaica, to early twentieth-century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the attempted government coup in 1990 by the Jamaat al-Muslimeen in Trinidad, as well as the island’s calypso music, to contemporary judicial cases concerning Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the “fullaman,” a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.
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South Asia Domestic Workers Movement
Global Asia
SPECIAL EVENT
Lessons from the South Asian Domestic Worker Movement
Friday, November 20, 2020
7:00 p.m. EST
REGISTER HERE
Presented by the Andolan Archive Project. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, Equality Labs, and South Asian American Digital Archive.
Since the year 2000, Andolan Organizing South Asian Workers has fought for justice for survivors and workers, always moving in solidarity with other oppressed communities. This virtual program features Andolan community members Gulnahar Alam and Rina Ali in conversation with South Asian American Digital Archive Executive Director Samip Mallick and longtime Andolan volunteer Chitra Aiyar.
NOTE: This event, originally scheduled on Friday, November 13, has been rescheduled to Friday, November 20.
Nov 12. Roundtable on Social Theory from the Global South
A book roundtable
discussing Durba Mitra’s Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought and Andrew Liu’s Tear War: A History of Capitalism in China and India, and how these books contribute to broader conversations around global social theory.
Featuring the authors in conversation with Meghna Chaudhuri, Anupama Rao, and Matt Schutzer.
9 am EST, Thursday November 12th.
Registration for the event can be found here: https://bit.ly/33PazOv
Tamil Merchants in China
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India China Center WEBINAR on Covid in Asia
Thursday, November 12.
9:00-10:30am EST/7:30pm New Delhi/10:00pm Beijing
Even as the COVID 19 pandemic continues to be marked by ebbs and flows, a handful of countries in Asia have had relatively sustained success in curtailing morbidity and mortality due to the virus. No single reason – such as regime type, surveillance technology, or experience with past epidemics – seems to explain these countries’ comparative achievements. This panel will bring together experts from different states including Japan, Vietnam, China, and South Korea. The juxtaposition of these national experiences will aim to illuminate the constellation of historical, political, infrastructural and other factors that undergird competent public health responses.
By joining this online event, you will be prompted to accept Zoom Terms of Service. If the session is recorded, you acknowledge that by participating, your name, phone number, and profile picture might be visible to the public. You can customize your personal information when creating your Zoom account. The New School may use any recorded material from the event.