Event

3620 Walnut St. Philadelphia, PA 19104

Vivek Bald, Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Media, MIT

Co-sponsored with the Center for Africana Studies

Drawing from his recently published book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), Bald will explore the lives and experiences of two little-known groups of South Asian Muslim migrants who came the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and settled within African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. The first was a group of small traders of embroidered silks who began selling their goods on New Jersey's beach boardwalks in the 1880s and then built a peddler network that was rooted in New Orleans and stretched throughout the U.S. South and into the Caribbean and Central America. The second group were workers on British steamships, who began jumping ship in New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia during WWI to escape indenture-like conditions and access factory and restaurant jobs onshore. Bald will trace out these early histories, exploring the ways South Asian migrants navigated both British colonial power and U.S. racialization, segregation, and immigration restrictions - and the ways African American and Puerto Rican communities provided these men with shelter and possibility at the height of the Asian Exclusion era. 

Bio: Vivek Bald is a writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker and is an Associate Professor in Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bald's work focuses on histories of the South Asian diaspora, with a focus on the dynamics of cross-racial encounter, intermixture, and affiliation. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013) and a co-editor of the collection The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (New York University Press, 2013). His films include Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (1994), Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (2003), and In Search of Bengali Harlem (in production). He is a member of MIT's recently formed Open Documentary Lab, where he is developing a web-based, participatory oral-history project, extending the scope of his written and film work on the shared lives of South Asian, African American and Puerto Rican residents of U.S. neighborhoods of color in the mid twentieth century.