Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

In this interdisciplinary course, students will study topics on the geographies, histories, cultures, knowledges, relationalities, and multiple ways of belonging of people in South Asia and South Asian diasporas. May be repeated for credit only when a different topic is taught.

COURSE DETAILS:

“South Asian Diasporas”

What sorts of attachments and estrangements are engendered in new ways of belonging “elsewhere”? This course provides critical perspectives to understand the stories of movements and mobilities of South Asians over global spaces. Although the scope of South Asian diasporas is global, we will study the very local and the everyday ways in which South Asian diasporas (in the UK, the Americas, East Africa, and within South Asia) are grounded and materialized through forms of placemaking, collective ways of belonging, and political activism. In doing so, we will underline how diasporic spaces become central to understanding empire, coloniality, home, nationalism, collective memory, belonging, and dispossession — all of which come together poignantly in Sabba Khan’s What is Home, Mum?.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

• We will evaluate interdisciplinary textual and visual materials to examine historical and contemporary processes through which to understand lived experiences of South Asians in the diaspora.
• We will examine how South Asia is not a fixed place or a timeless regional entity. Rather, drawing on Doreen Massey’s “a global sense of place”, we will learn about South Asia through the lens of relationality, transnational flows, and local-global connections of humans and non-humans.
• We will develop ways to engage with topics including memory, nation, religion, gender, migrations, and diasporas.
• Through multiple peer-review workshops, we will learn about the different components that make up a research proposal.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: