The conference seeks to explore the new tensions and possibilities raised in South Asian diaspora studies. South Asia’s many different and distinct communities, histories of war and trade, nation building and nation dividing, colonization and decolonization have presented scholars with very distinct histories and projects of diaspora. Is the diaspora concept analytically productive when it is broadened to South Asians populations outside of Europe and North America? How do we think of diasporas produced across the Indian Ocean or south-to-south diasporas including migrations within South Asia? What happens to the diaspora concept when we think of the global North as a node or turnstile in global flows, not a destination constituted by a singular moment of arrival and departure? How do we account for the ways the nation continues to organize collective memory, aspirations, identifications and desires for those in diaspora?
Sponsored by Kempf Fund at the Macmillan Center, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, South Asian Studies Council, Ethnicity, Race and Migration Program, The Transnational Connections Working Group/African Studies Council, American Studies, Department of English, and Yale Law School.