Contemporary Issues in South Asian Diasporic Popular Culture

In the second of a four-part seminar series on South Asian diasporic cultural politics, our speakers focus upon contemporary issues in South Asian popular culture, with a particular focus on youth cultures and cultural translation. Topics include the comic series Spiderman in India, the US Muslim punk movement — known as ‘Taqwacore’ — and online communities, and the cultural and spatial politics of the desi club scene in London.

The Cultural Politics of the South Asian Diaspora is a series of four seminars initiated by Anamik Saha, visiting scholar in the Program in Comparative Media Studies (CMS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and hosted by CMS. It assembles a transatlantic network of scholars from the US and Europe researching the expressive cultures of the South Asian diaspora.

Entry is free. Please email Anamik Saha (asaha@mit.edu) to RSVP.

About the speakers:

Shilpa Davé, an assistant professor of American studies, holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Michigan. She has published in the fields of Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Literature and Popular Culture on topics ranging from teaching Asian American Studies to “No Life Without Wife: Masculinity and Modern Arranged Meetings for Indian Americans” to “Apu’s Brown Voice: Cultural Inflection and South Asian Accents” and Model Minorities and the Spelling Bee. Davé is the co-editor of “East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture” (2005). Her current book project is entitled Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Film and TV (under contract to University of Illinois Press).

Dhiraj Murthy is an assistant professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College. His current research explores social networking cyberinfrastructure and virtual organizations. His work on social networking technologies in virtual breeding grounds is funded by the National Science Foundation, Office of CyberInfrastructure. Murthy also has a book on Twitter under contract with Polity Press. He founded and currently directs the Social Network Innovation Lab, an interdisciplinary research group investigating social networks and virtual organizations.

Helen Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics. Her dissertation is on diaspora, space and the London ‘desi’ urban Asian music scene. Her research interests are in ‘race’, ethnicity, particularly with a focus on popular culture’.