Each presentation will be 15 minutes with a 15-minute for discussion.

Ruma’s paper examines Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents to argue that the absence of engagement with Dalit women’s experience of caste-based gender violence in the text highlights an erasure of their voices that continue to remain the “other polities” within contemporary multicultural and multilingual US. Wilkerson’s text draws from the concept of the Indian caste system to define structural manifestation of race in the US. It provides a major platform to discuss caste, but caste-based gendered violence is not adequately addressed. Within the #MeToo context, what kind of language can we use to examine, address, and engage with the intersectional violence that Dalit women face? How can we be attentive to the voices of Dalit women so that their history and resistance are included in the diverse public sphere of the US?

Tehmina’s paper critically examines Malala Yousafzai who has been co-opted within the U.S imperialist discourses. However, these hegemonic discourses rarely acknowledge the local iterations of global movements such as #MeToo. Within the Pakistani context, #MeToo has become a powerful tool to theorize about sexual violence against minor girls (#JusticeforZainab). Popular culture offers visibility to these grassroots movements against sexual violence through Pakistani dramas such as Udaari/Flight and Dar Si Jati Hai Sila/Sila Gets Frightened, which explores the impact of sexual violence on minor girls. By focusing on these dramas, this paper establishes the crucial necessity of examining the testimonies and vulnerabilities of those minor girls— the other Malalas—whose stories remain shrouded in silence. This paper addresses how these dramas center discourses of vulnerability to focus upon the sexual stigma associated with rape and expose the cult of domesticity that persistently blames the minor victims. As a result, these Pakistani dramas engender dialogue about rape and emphasize the need for effective institutional and cultural responses to it.

Nidhi’s paper critically examines Ayah/Shanta’s figure in the re-reading of Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India and its adaptation by Deepa Mehta’s Earth and Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear The Nightbird Call? as cultural and pedagogical texts to argue that a raped woman’s body lies in the intersections of hyper-nationalism, violence, shame, honour, and silence. At the pinnacle of the #MeToo movement in America, while there has been memorialization of women’s experiences during major genocides such as the Holocaust, there has been no mention of the Partition. She investigates representations of raped/abducted women whose narratives remain invisible within the mainstream discourse. Partition’s sexual violence and its aftermath are only mourned and memorialized selectively by people who are directly affected by them in India and the diaspora. Thus, the reclamation of women’s narratives of the Partition is imperative as we reel from the repercussions of the #MeToo movement.

Sumitra will problematize the idea of Multilingual US and reimagining the #MeToo movement, within the context of the Armed Forces Special Power(s) Act, and sexual violence in northeastern India. She examines otherization to see the repercussions it has in a region that is torn with conflict and pushed to the margins of existence and at times hardly fits with the paradigm of what is considered Indian or South Asian. She will address the issue of absences and exclusions within the rubric of Multilingual US, South Asian Diaspora and the #MeToo movement in subversive terms. Her argument will be grounded on the rape and extrajudicial-killing of Thangjam Manorama, among others. It will explore representations of resistance in literary and cultural texts, specifically Kanhailal’s play Draupadi, and Temsula Ao’s “The Last Song,” as these texts address militarization, state-enforced violence and human rights abuses.