Kavita Daiya
Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, George Washington University
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Dr. Daiya is Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and founder and director of the Immigration and Migration Studies Micro-Minor in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at the George Washington University. She is also the former director (2018-2021) of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at GWU.
Daiya’s scholarship about the cultural histories and socio-political legacies of modern immigration and migration is located at the intersection of Postcolonial Studies, Asian American Studies, Transnational Feminisms, and Race and Ethnic Studies. In its sustained commitment to how gender and sexuality shape citizenship, displacement, and power in the United States and Asia, her scholarship contributes to new directions in Transnational Feminist Studies. Her first book "Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India" ([2008] 2011; 2013) illuminates how South Asian and South Asian American literature and cinema represent decolonization and gendered violence during the 1947 Partition of South Asia, from 1947-2008. Her second book "Graphic Migrations: Precarity and Gender in India and the Diaspora" (2020) draws upon the insights of Critical Refugee Studies, to offer a feminist analysis of post-1947 geopolitical displacement and refugee experience. It studies migration stories through South Asian and Asian American public culture across a range of media, from literature and film to graphic narratives, photography, print culture, oral histories, advertising, and art. Her interest in transmedia and public culture as sites for socio-political critique also led to her edited volume "Graphic Narratives about South Asian and South Asian America: Aesthetics and Politics" (2019), which is the first edited volume to document the interventionist, critical energy of South Asian and South Asian American graphic narratives together, on issues like gender-based violence, ecological justice, authoritarianism, human rights, and colonialism, among others. Recent articles and reviews have appeared in edited volumes as well as journals like PMLA, Genders, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, American Book Review, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of South Asian History and Culture, among others. She was also a member of the Founding Board of Directors of the 1947PartitionArchive.org (2015-2021). Shde received her PhD from the University of Chicago.
In the past, Professor Daiya has served as visiting NEH Chair in the Humanities at Albright College (2015-2016) and was the Andrew W. Mellon Regional Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Humanities Forum (2014-2015, 2012-2013). She is a former M.A. Program Director in the English Department (2010-2014). She serves as Affiliated Faculty in the Global Women’s Institute, the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, the Sustainability Program, and the Peace Studies Program.
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Hidden Histories of Migration in Global Asias: Rethinking Sustainable Publics, Envisioning Change
Panel: Hidden Histories of Migration in Global Asias: Rethinking Sustainable Publics and Envisioning Change
This panel’s interdisciplinary dialogue illuminates the diverse, hidden histories of transnational Asian
migration circuits after WWII. New scholarship across the disciplines has illuminated transnational Asian displacement and migration practices in ways that challenge hegemonic ideas about racialized citizenship, the state, and belonging. Further, a Global Asias approach across the disciplines interrogates conventional geopolitical frames and recasts our received understanding of the borders and boundaries of Asia, Asian America, and the Asian diaspora; this opens up new possibilities, both in the academy as well as in activist praxis, for creating new counterpublics of engagement and resistance toward sustainable change/justice. Anchored in this Global Asias approach, this panel highlights new research that critically engages with the neglected histories, archives, and experiences of transnational Asian migration since WWII. The panel welcomes papers that consider transnational Asian migration and movement in all their complexity, with attention to how a Global Asias approach generates new critical insights about histories (individual, state, and collective), identities, and counterpublics that have otherwise been obscured.
This interdisciplinary engagement with Asian movement and transit, we hope and contend, offers new, aspirational ways to reimagine activism, identity, belonging, and collective struggle today. The five papers in this panel draw upon the Global Asias approach to chase the specter of justice in the midst of raced migration and dispossession. They do so through an eclectic range of sites and scattered geographies: documentary films, photography, murals, literature, and cooking. Gathering scholars from a range of disciplines as well as public and private institutions, this panel is anchored in an intersectional approach that queers the normative boundaries of Asia, Asian America, and the Asian diaspora. Together, these papers uncover hidden circuits of (im)mobility shaped by race, caste, and gender, that traverse China, India, Bahrain, Japan, Canada, UAE, and the United States. Paying special attention to the changing histories of race and gender, and to the politics of caste, as they shape identity, citizenship, conflict, and belonging, this new research explores how Asian/American cultural representations, across media, can play an important role todayin imagining sustainable change, in recasting redress and reparation, in creating inter-racial solidarity, in rethinking race, gender, and caste, and in demanding justice in the face of violence.
Rethinking Hidden Histories of Migration in Global Asias: Counterpublics of Resistance
This panel examines the hidden histories of migration across Asia and the Asian American diaspora, through a range of papers that draws upon a fruitful engagement with the
conceptual framework of Global Asias. Following up on the panel sponsored by Verge: Studies of Global Asias on the same theme, this panel also centers an intersectional approach to hitherto neglected transnational Asian migration stories, uncovering the role of gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity in shaping displacement, resistance, and survival. Through a focus on literature, story-telling, and historographic analysis anchored in feminist and queer thought, the papers here decolonize hidden histories of transnational Asian migration. In the process, they interrogate conventional geopolitical frames of the borders and boundaries of Asia, Asian America, and the Asian diaspora. This interdisciplinary engagement with Asian movement and transit, links scattered geographies across Asia and the United States; we hope and contend that it offers new, aspirational ways to reimagine activism, identity, belonging, and collective struggle today.
Margie Tang-Oxley narrates the multiple migrations across China and the US of Cold War culinary ambassador, Grace Zia Chu, to reveal how Asian Americans weaponized their gender, race, and lived experiences to craft an embodied performance of the model minority myth. Wonjeong Kim and Corinna Barrett Percy examine two memoirs by biracial Asian American women and argue that as the authors strive to restore their connection with their maternal heritage and Asian identity through their individual memories and personal storytelling, they also reveal the marginalization of Asian women immigrants, whose voices are oppressed by the cultural, social, and political barriers of American patriarchy and imperialism. Min Kyung Boo sheds light on the immigration history of South Korean “military brides” to examine the Asian American trope of survival in the transnational context of U.S. military imperialism. Following Kuan-hsing Chen’s concept of inter-Asian referencing as a decolonial and de-imperial research methodology, Kai Cheang’s paper analyzes accounts of Yuli Riswati’s experience as an Indonesian domestic worker in Taiwan and Hong Kong to propose and model an ethic of femin-queer engagement that interpellates a reading counter-public that is critical of global racial capitalism. Attentive to how race, gender, sexuality, and class shape these hidden histories, this panel engages a Global Asias approach to disclose transnational Asian displacement and migration practices in ways that challenge hegemonic ideas about racialized and gendered citizenship, the imperial state, and capital.
Reframing Storytelling and Activism in South Asian America: Hidden Histories, Memories, Literatures
Panel description: This panel reframes conventional scholarly, pedagogical, and public-facing conversations about South Asian American histories and memories through a focus on inclusion and exclusion as they mark the stories we tell. In response to the conference theme’s invitation to engage with a “focused and intensive treatment of South Asian American Studies” that situates “South Asian Americans and South Asian nations at the center of our (inter)disciplinary inquiries,” the papers presented here center immigrant South Asia, but do so in ways that decenter the conventional dominance of India and Hinduism in public discourses about South Asia. They take up questions about memory, politics, labor, religion, and unequal citizenship in vivid new ways; in the process, they transform received understandings of the historically changing forms of raced and gendered identities in the global diasporas that make up Asian/American Studies.
Approaching our South Asian American communities from diverse disciplines, this panel gathers scholars and writers that illuminate inclusion/exclusion through the stories they tell about minority experiences and activism in Asia and North America. Thus, the panel’s presentations examine labor immigration and the intellectual history of the Ghadar Party, belonging reimagined in the Nepali American diaspora, feminist Sikh American memoirs about secularized Sikhism, and Chinese-Indian diasporas’ hidden experiences of inter-Asian war and internment.
As such, the panel resonates with two key topics enumerated in the conference theme: “Contextualizing/Interrelating Oppressions” and “How the Global & Transnational relate to Asian America.” By affirming an intersectional lens to the diverse histories under discussion, attending to the politics of race, gender, religion, and class as they disclose hidden stories about struggle, solidarity, and imagining change in South Asian America. The panel is intentionally created to bring together faculty and graduate colleagues in the field, from a range of departments as well as public and private institutions from across the United States.
Diasporic Reframings and Critical Refugee Studies: South Asian/American Studies ....
This panel addresses the conference theme of inclusion and exclusion by centering and interrelating South Asian/American Studies and Southeast Asian/American Studies in ways that expand and transform Asian American Studies. Anchored in a historicized approach, this panel’s transnational exploration of war, identity, and displacement links Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Afghanistan and their diasporas. It is animated by two key questions: How might new attention to different geographies, temporalities, diasporas, and archives reshape how and what we see about migrant and refugee experience? How does engaging with Critical Refugee Studies (CRS) offer new insights for our understanding of racialized citizenship and belongings that inhabit Southeast Asian/American and South Asian/American lives, whether or not our communities are
classified as “refugees” by the US government? Linking diverse texts, performances, foods, and histories within and across communities–in North America, as well as beyond–this panel directly addresses a key conference topic: the Global and Transnational relating to Asian “America.” The papers gathered here create an interdisciplinary dialogue that studies the impact of empires on “refugee” status for Indonesians; the formation of Vietnamese refugee cultural archives of digital foodways; migrant justice and graphic storytelling about refugees from South Asia; and Sri Lankan performing artist groups in Southern California. By gathering scholars from a range of disciplines, public and private institutions, and ranks, including junior and senior scholars from the east and west coasts, this panel contributes to the 2024 theme in inclusive and innovative ways.
Kavita Daiya
Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, George Washington University
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