Among the many characters in The Scatter Here Is Too Great, Bilal Tanweer‘s new novel, is the city of Karachi itself: its diverse, thriving population. The episodic novel follows a series of characters and voices after a bomb goes off at Karachi Cantt station.  Sadia Shepard will show an excerpt of her gorgeous film cycle The Other Half of Tomorrow, focusing of feminist organizing in Karachi. Durba Mitra will moderate the evening, bringing to it her research on South Asian histories.

Sadia Shepard is a Pakistani-American documentary film producer and author based in New York City. Shepard produced The Education of Mohammad Hussain, a portrait of a traditional Muslim school in Detroit, MI. She also produced The September Issue, an inside look at Vogue, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Excellence in Cinematography at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Times of India, Wall Street Journal Magazine and The New York Times. Shepard’s first book, The Girl From Foreign, was published by The Penguin Press in 2008.

Bilal Tanweer was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. His fiction, poetry, and translations have appeared in various international journals, including Granta, Vallum, The Caravan, and Words Without Borders. He was selected as a Granta New Voice in 2011 and was named an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He lives in Lahore, Pakistan.

Durba Mitra, Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Fordham, is interested in the role of sexuality in the intellectual and cultural histories of modern South Asia. Her current project investigates how the figure of the sexually deviant woman, often depicted as the prostitute, was central in the making of a new sociological imagination in Bengal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She specializes in the social and intellectual histories of Modern South Asia, histories of sexuality, the history of science and medicine, the history of women and gender, and comparative histories of marginality and difference. Image above: Bus art, Karachi.

Photo by Andreas Burgess.

Save a seat here!