Bol: An SAI Blog

SAI Student Blog

In Conversation: Francesca Orsini

April 26, 2024

Francesca Orsini is a literary historian interested in bringing a located and multilingual perspective to Indian literary history and world literature. She is the author of The Hindi Public Sphere (2002), Print and Pleasure (2009), and East of Delhi: Multilingual literary culture and world literature (2023), and the editor of, among others, Love in South Asia: A Cultural History (2006), Hinglish Live (2022, with Ravikant), and The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form (2022, with Neelam Srivastava and Laetitia Zecchini). She co-edits with Debjani Ganguly the series Cambridge Studies in World Literatures and Cultures, and with Whitney Cox the forthcoming Cambridge History of Indian Literature. She is Professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Dr. Francesca Orisini's interview by Arfa Ezazi was facilitated by the South Asia Institute.

In Conversation: Noor Zaidi

April 8, 2024

Noor Zaidi (Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, Baltimore) is a scholar of the Middle East and South Asia. She specializes in the history of gender, sectarianism, and Shi’a Islam in national and transnational spaces. Her research explores “sites of sectarianization” through the 20th century, tracing the development and evolution of pilgrimage to two female shrines in Syria and Pakistan and prisons in Iraq as sites of memory and identity construction. Based on oral interviews, fieldwork, and archival research in Syria, Pakistan, and Iraq, Zaidi’s work draws from the archives of Urdu, Persian, and Arabic while exploring the physical and imaginative spaces in which identity is made and contested. Her scholarship shows how transnational narratives become embedded in local contexts.

Dr. Noor Zaidi's interview by Arfa Ezazi was facilitated by the South Asia Institute.

In Conversation: Bassam Sidiki

Plaque - A Poetry Reading by Bassam Sidiki

April 4, 2024

Bassam Sidiki was invited to the Spring 2024 South Asia Seminar Series and presented a talk titled "The Cripistemology of a Closet."

Bassam Sidiki is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, having affiliations with the Center for Asian American Studies, the South Asia Institute, and the M.A. program in Humanities, Health, and Medicine. He conducts research and teaching at the juncture of postcolonial and empire studies, health humanities, and disability studies. In this talk, Sidiki read excerpts from his hybrid memoir in progress, Karachi, Kalamazoo, which chronicles his migration to the United States from Pakistan as a teenager, his diagnosis with leukemia, and coming to terms with queer identity. Deconstructing the trope of the “closet” by placing it in a South Asian “crip” milieu, he triangulates the theoretical work already undertaken about South Asian queerness with histories and presents of disability. With a nod to Eve Sedgwick, he asks: how could one think about not just an “epistemology of the closet” but what disability studies scholars have called “cripistemology”?

Dr. Sidiki's interview by Noor Fatima Bokhari and Arfa Ezazi was facilitated by the South Asia Institute.

Dr. Sidiki also gave a poetry reading from his poem titled Plaque.

In Conversation: Chandan Reddy

March 28, 2024

Chandan Reddy, Associate Professor in Departments of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington, Seattle, was invited to the  Spring 2024 South Asia Seminar Series and presented a talk on “Queer Vernaculars: Liberal, Governance, Globality, Livability.”

Dr. Chandan Reddy's interview by Arfa Ezazi was facilitated by the South Asia Institute.

Poetry Readings by Hasan Mujtaba

Ainee Sahiba (Lady Ainee)

Gaza Ke Bachon Per Ronay Walo (You Who Cry for the Children of Gaza)

Gulzar ki Wapsi Per (Upon the Return of Gulzar)

Aakhri Raqs (Last Dance)

February 1, 2024

Hasan Mujtaba, author of Koel Shahr ki Katha (A Tale of Cuckoo's City) (2015), and most recently, Tum Dhanak Orhe Lena (Wear the Rainbow) (2021), was invited to the Spring 2024 South Asia Seminar series, themed 'Queer Authorship: Coming of Age in South Asia.'

Hasan Mujtaba is a Pakistani poet and journalist. Born in the Sindh–Punjab bordering town of Ubauro, Mujtaba went into exile in 1999 owing to his documentation of the persecution of Hindus in Sindh, a subject which earned him the wrath of his country’s government. He is the author of poetry volumes titled "Koel Shahr ki Katha" (A Tale of Cuckoo's City: 2015), and "Tum Dhanak Orhe Lena" (Wear the Rainbow: 2021). He has also translated one hundred poems of 18th Century Sindhi Poet, Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai. Mujtaba currently resides in New York City.

The following poetry readings were recorded by Arfa Azazi.

Trapped in the Past: Elections and the Unending Crisis of Pakistan's Political Economy with Ammar Ali Jan

February 22, 2024

Ammar Ali Jan is a Pakistani historian, activist, youth leader and academic. He is a self-proclaimed Marxist, founder and president of Haqooq-e-Khalq Party, also a member of Progressive International.

Jan has published and continues to publish regular articles on progressive politics in newspapers like The News International, Al Jazeera, The Friday Times, Herald (Pakistan) and a few others. He has authored the book Rule by Fear: Eight Theses on Authoritarianism in Pakistan (Folio Books, November 2021).