New Histories of the South Asian Diaspora

MIT Building E51, Room 325 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA

A reading and discussion with authors Gaiutra Bahadur and Vivek Bald.

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

MIT Building 4, Room 231 Cambridge, MA

Vivek Bald discusses 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 and quietly settled and intermarried within African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods from Harlem to Tremé in New Orleans and Black Bottom, Detroit.

Vivek Bald, “If I Could Reach the Border…”

MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area) 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA

Vivek Bald will read from a new essay that uses a teenage encounter with police and the justice system to explore questions of immigrant acceptability, racialization, and the South Asians American embrace of model minority status.