The Bengali Harlem/Lost Histories Project: Documenting South Asian America’s Interracial Past

Vivek Bald, an Associate Professor in CMS/W and member of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, will discuss his transmedia project documenting the lives of Bengali Muslim ship workers and silk peddlers who entered the United States at the height of the Asian Exclusion Era, between the 1890s and 1940s, and quietly settled and intermarried within African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods from Harlem to Tremé in New Orleans and Black Bottom, Detroit.

The project consists of a book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (2013), a linear documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem (currently in production), and a community-sourced, web-based documentary and oral history project, “The Lost Histories Project” (in development). Bald’s talk and demo will present a new iteration of the online project and newly edited material from the documentary.