Diaspora/Migration

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's poems evoke borders of bodies and nation.

This fragmented, musical novel breaks the prettiness of memory, brings irreverent humor where it should, shows the crisscross of ethnic neighborhoods in New York City, and celebrates love in the midst of violence. 

Choreographer Joti Singh reflects on her own familial connections to Ghadar history,  staged recently in her production "Red, Saffron, and Green."

Anirvan Chatterjee takes us on a tour of Berkeley’s radical South Asian American history, and argues that historical memory is one of the key inspirations for contemporary political movements

Dear Readers,

Gendered violence plays a pervasive and significant role in the lives of modern women around the globe. In that vein, we present a special issue on women’s responses and activism against gender-based violence in South Asian and South Asian diasporic communities.

A long history of agit prop inspires SAWCC's recent "FreedomSafetyNow" protest against gender-based violence.

Nahar Alam and Chitra Aiyar discuss the varied, subtle, and often unknown narratives that arise both in the not-for-profit economy and the lives of the members of Andolan-a among the members of Andolan – Organizing South Asian Workers, a Queens-based workers’ center that seeks to empower low-wage immigrant workers (primarily female domestic workers) through popular education, collective organizing, and litigation. 

This was my world, where the city met the pulse of irrepressible wildlife, where my parents and their friends created a Muslim community from scratch. It is this world and the leaving of it I recreate in my writing.

Poems pass through moments, as do our lives. Both poetry and justice necessitate a vision, a series of quiet actions built from contemplation and our own observations. Both poetry & justice necessitate desires, this wanting & wanting more, this knowing & knowing more. This stitching between – a kind of locking of skewed, errant and yet beautiful tiles – is the movement between the world of poetry & this world itself, between the world itself & the world we desire – the world we will one day make.

I entered Sri Lankan Tamil politics simply by telling my own story and listening to family and community stories. My earliest childhood memories were of Jaffna (Yalpannam), Sri Lanka—the place after whom I was named. My bedtime stories were of the struggle of Tamil people. Of gatherings tear gassed. Of riots. And of my parents along with the rest of our community, standing up for our rights.