Dartmouth Events

This talk considers the contemporary stakes of post-1947 migration stories as they appear in visual media in South Asia and South Asian America. It addresses texts and digital archiving practices that illuminate the legacies of the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent for discourses of gendered citizenship, belonging, and just community in the subcontinent and the diaspora. The memorywork of this archive enfolds an activist imagination; it illuminates hidden histories of displacement, and creates new, transnational political solidarities toward anti-war futures.

Preeti Singh will moderate.

Sponsored by the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program & The Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund.

Dr. Kavita Daiya is Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the founder and director of the Immigration and Migration Studies micro minor at GWU. Her first book Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India (2008) illuminates how South Asian and South Asian American literature and cinema represent decolonization and gendered violence during the 1947 Partition of South Asia, from 1947-2008. Her second book Graphic Migrations: Precarity and Gender in India and the Diaspora (2020) studies migration stories through South Asian and Asian American public culture across a range of media, from literature and film to graphic narratives, photography, print culture, oral histories, advertising, and art. She is the editor of Graphic Narratives about South Asian and South Asian America: Aesthetics and Politics (2019). Her articles have appeared in journals like PMLA, Genders, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, American Book Review, Journal of Asian Studies, and Journal of South Asian History and Culture, among others. She is a member of the Founding Board of Directors of the 1947PartitionArchive.org (2015-2021), an oral history project on the partition of the Indian subcontinent.