We are joining teams with Dissent Magazine to celebrate the launch of the magazine’s Spring issue, “Border Crossings,” featuring a discussion with Vivek Bald, Gaiutra Bahadur, Jack Tchen, and Minh-Ha T. Pham, moderated by Michelle Chen. The panel will start at 7:30 p.m. sharp. To read Dissent’s Spring issue for free, sign up for their email newsletter by March 31: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/read-our-spring-issue-for-free
Labeled everything from model minorities to national threats, immigrants often tread a precarious path between fear and acceptance, being exoticized or reviled, between viewed as one of “us” or one of “them.” How have different immigrant groups navigated the divisive cultural politics of these real and imagined borders? And more importantly, how have they challenged them?
Drawing on historic and contemporary photographs, art, fashion, advertisements and pop culture featuring South Asian, Chinese, Indo-Caribbean and other migrants, Vivek Bald (author of Bengali Harlem: Exploring the Lost Histories of South Asian America), Gaiutra Bahadur (author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture), Jack Tchen (author of Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear) and Minh-Ha T. Pham (author of Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet) discuss the cultural politics of migration.
VIVEK BALD is a scholar and filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of South Asian migration and diaspora. He is author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America and is currently working on his second book, The Rise and Fall of ‘Prince’ Ranji Smile: Fantasies of India at the Dawn of the American Century. He teaches media studies and writing at MIT.
GAIUTRA BAHADUR is the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which was shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prize.
JACK (JOHN KUO WEI) TCHEN is a scholar and author of award-winning books such as New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, and more recently, of Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear published by Verso in 2014. He regularly collaborates with filmmakers and media producers, artists and collectors, and through the A/P/A Institute sponsors and produces hundreds of programs and performances.
MINH-HA T. PHAM is an interdisciplinary scholar focussing on how race, gender, and class shape contemporary fashion media technologies, conditions, and practices. Her forthcoming book Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet, which examines personal style blogging within the broader history of fashion labor, is due out in October 2015.
MICHELLE CHEN is the co-editor, with Kaavya Asoka, of the “Border Crossings” special section in the Spring 2015 issue of Dissent.
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