Today, nearly 5.4 million South Asians live in the U.S., emigrating from countries such as Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Afghanistan. How do movies, television series, and literature shape our understanding of what it means to be South Asian in America today?
Dr. Preeti Singh will discuss TV shows such as Ms. Marvel and literature by fiction writers and poets like Meena Alexander to highlight stories that explore the South Asian diaspora. She'll examine the limitations of these stories – what stories are palatable to broader audiences in the United States – and how living in both the U.S. and a global, interconnected world shapes South Asians' sense of identity.
About the presenter:
Preeti Singh is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leslie Center for the Humanities and affiliated with the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages program at Dartmouth College. She researches and teaches postcolonial studies and world literature, focusing on twentieth and twenty-first-century South Asian and South Asian diasporic literature and cinema. She is interested in literary expressions of social and political crises at the intersections of decolonization and the global cold war, discourses of human rights, and the contemporary rhetoric of populism.
Preeti received her Ph.D. in English from Ohio State University-Columbus in August 2022. Her doctoral dissertation examines literary and cinematic representations of the widely memorialized national emergency declared by Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975. Reading across a range of genres— novels, theatre, cinema, and political cartoons, Postcolonial Exceptions, scripts a literary and cultural history of post-independence India through the prism of the 'Emergency.' Preeti received her M.A. and M. Phil degrees at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her academic work has appeared, among others, in South Asian Review, The International Journal of Comic Art, the Journal of Drama Studies, Strange Horizons, and Raiot Magazine.
