NOTE: THIS EVENT IS POSTPONED AND WILL BE RESCHEDULED FOR SPRING 2019.

Join us for an event about India on the eve of Independence through a Tolstoyan biographical saga and visual studies of decolonization and British archaeology. We’ll hear from Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker, whose sumptuous new group biography The Last Englishmen is an epic portrait of characters who stood on the edge of history, from the British geographers who strove to be the first to climb Mount Everest, to the Indian nationalists who saw their downfall. Vazira Zaminder, historian of modern South Asia, will share her work on the British archaeology and visual practices in the Northwest Frontier with Afghanistan. Moderated by Siddhartha Deb, Professor of Creative Writing at the New School and the author of the eye-opening journalistic account of India’s gilded age, The Beautiful and the Damned.

RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and Mount Everest, Deborah Baker’s The Last Englishmen (Graywolf, 2018) a nonfiction epic about the waning of the British Empire in India that presents an exhilarating drama of Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Neel Mukherjee writes, “It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that there is something Tolstoyan to her vast project.” Deborah Baker attended the University of Virginia and Cambridge University, where she wrote her first biography Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly. She is author of In Extremis; The Life of Laura Riding, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1994, and A Blue Hand: The Beats in India. In 2008–2009 she was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis C. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at The New York Public Library, where she researched and wrote The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in Non-Fiction. She currently divides her time between Brooklyn and Goa.

Vazira Zamindar is Associate Professor of History at Brown University. Her book, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, was published by Columbia University Press in 2007, the Indian and Pakistani editions of the book came out in 2008, and the Urdu translation in 2014. Stories from the book have been performed by the Delhi-based Dastangoi (Dastaan-e-Partition), and the book has been an inspiration for Mara Ahmad’s film A Thin Wall (2015), Shayma Sayid’s dance Kanhaiya yaad hai kuch bhee hamari (South Bank Center, London, August 2017), and for the San Francisco Enacte Arts’ play The Parting (2018). She is presently working on a second book on the history of archaeology and war on the northwest frontier of British India, on the borderlands with Afghanistan, and has received the International Institute of Asian Studies Fellowship, the Fulbright, and the National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship, amongst others, for this project.

Siddhartha Deb is the author of The Beautiful and the Damned, winner of the PEN Open award and a finalist for the Orwell Prize. A columnist for The Baffler and The New York Times Book Review and contributing editor to The New Republic, his writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, and n+1.

This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.

NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.

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