Border Zones of Global South Asia Symposium

Border Zones of Global South Asia: Diaspora, Dispossession, and Decolonization

This symposium gathers scholars of Global South Asia to think through questions of obliterative and traumatic violence within border zones of the region including Kashmir, Punjab, and Bangladesh, among other geographies. Participants focus on South Asia and its diasporas to unsettle discourses of empire, land dispossession, and histories of erasure. Border zones remain sites of struggles over religion, caste, language, gender and sexuality, cohabitation, and accommodation. We anchor our conversation in the exciting publication of Dr. Sahana Ghosh’s new book A Thousand Tiny Cuts Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands. Ghosh's book asks: How do people who live in borderlands experience and analyze the changing life of the border? She argues that to narrate how people navigate and live with the violence and injustices of bordering is to reach beyond a victimhood/resistance binary. Attention to transnational migration, through a feminist perspective, opens up understandings of settler colonialism, complicity, and critical diaspora studies. Emphasis will be on pushing against the spatial and temporal boundaries of current scholarship on South Asia to open up the possibilities for imagining the overlapping, mobile, and shifting ways that these discourses function in larger conversations across Global Asian Studies.

We build from earlier institutional forums including “After Area Studies” that occurred at Northeastern in 2022-23 to bring together Asian Studies with Asian Diaspora Studies, and to destabilize hegemonic discourses about South Asia. We ground the conversation in a host of concerns including the multiple ways in which scholars are resisting the sweeping campaign to “Saffronize” or “Saffron-wash” India. Further, in thinking about questions of migration and diaspora, transnational and global analyses bring together diasporas and “homelands” in new ways. For example, we pay attention to new waves of migration and the complexities of these flows and settlement patterns, as well as new forms of violence, resistance, and refusal.

This event will be an open symposium, welcoming the Northeastern community, as well as scholars and community members from across the Boston area. We plan to circulate keywords and questions centered around the theme of diaspora, dispossession, and decolonization ahead of the gathering, and ask each of the panelists to reflect in relation to their scholarship.

Host or Publisher Northeastern University Asian Studies Program