Cultural Politics of the South Asian Diaspora: Popular Cultural Responses to the “War on Terror”

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

In this first of a four-part seminar series on South Asian diasporic cultural politics, Rajini Srikanth and Vijay Prashad discuss two South Asian popular cultural responses to 9-11 and ‘the war on terror’: M.I.A.’s ‘Born Free’ music video, and the Bollywood film ‘My Name is Khan’.

The Cultural Politics of the South Asian Diaspora is a series of four seminars organized by Anamik Saha, a 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.

Rajini Srikanth teaches in the English department, Honors Program, and Asian American Studies at UMass Boston. She is author of the award winning book The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America (2004) and the forthcoming book Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in U.S. Literature and Law.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College. He is the author of eleven books including The Karma of Brown Folk (2002) and Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting (2002). His most recent book, The Darker Nations, won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Award for 2009.