| Description | S. Charusheela chairs the Symposium: South Asian Diaspora and Black Lives Matter: Cinematic and Literary Perspective Register for this event, and learn more about the panelists. Panelists include: Nalini Iyer (Professor, Seattle University), Yashica Dutt (Author), Mary Anne Mohanraj (Author), Tarun Jain (Filmmmaker), Yasir Masood (Filmmaker). The event is brought to you by the Tasveer South Asian Film Festival (TSAFF) in partnership with the University of Washington South Asia Center.
This symposium discusses the racial and political fallout of the May 2020 George Floyd murder, which has permanently transformed our world. Set against the Covid-19 pandemic that has exposed the racial fault lines in the US, this event has triggered a massive multi-racial and intergenerational Black Lives Matter movement - the largest protest since the Civil Rights movement: Monuments to colonizers, Confederates, and racists have been toppled across the country, calls for the abolition and defunding of the police continue to grow, and anti-Black racism has come to occupy the core of the national electoral debates. As the movement for police accountability grows globally, we find ourselves located at an important historical conjecture. What role must the South Asian diaspora play in this struggle against anti-Black racism, especially since we migrated to the US on the back of the Blacks that birthed the 1965 Immigration Act? What is our responsibility in imagining a society that is committed to fighting systemic anti-Black racism? In what ways can we move beyond tokenistic support for the Black Lives Matter movement and advocate for policy reform in a genuine sense of the term? Given our social privilege and capital, how can we amplify disenfranchised voices? The symposium brings together South Asian filmmakers, writers, scholars, and public intellectuals to discuss some of these key issues structured as below:
- The representative power of film and literature in combating anti-Black racism
- The politics of colorism and casteism from back home that makes us complicit in anti-Black racism in the US
- The danger of “Brown silence” which reproduces racial hierarchies and does more harm than good by under-preparing South Asians for dealing with systemic oppression in the United States.
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