A session on this topic is timely given our global yet unequal world, where people are in constant movement driven by capitalist, imperialist, and racist events such as war, violence, communal riots, racial discrimination, religious atrocities, and colorism. Thus, immigration, displacement, belonging, and un-belonging, though they have a long history, remain current phenomena. This makes the panel urgent, allowing scholars to discuss these issues and find ways to build solidarity, aiming to work for the rights and emancipation of women, based on their heterogeneous experiences rather than homogeneity. The panel provides a space to analyze how creative expression becomes a site of political engagement, critique, and solidarity.
This panel is grounded in existing scholarship on diaspora studies, transnational poetics, and feminist resistance and solidarity across borders. Diaspora studies and transnational literature are integrally connected, and this rendition is an ongoing debate. This debate has a decades-long tradition and grounds in many texts. Some recent interventions that contribute to the development of transnational and diaspora studies include Jahan Ramazani’s Transnational Poetics (2015), Jerome Branche’s The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora: Transatlantic Musings (2015), Clemens Spahr’s A Poetics of Global Solidarity: Modern American Poetry and Social Movement (2015), Amit Sarwal’s South Asian Diaspora Narratives: Roots and Routes (2017), and Paul Jay’s Transnational Literature: The Basics (2021) to name a few. Recent scholarship has expanded these conversations by addressing queer diasporas, digital activism, and the intersections of caste, religion, and gender in transnational contexts.
This is a traditional panel in which four scholars present their papers, each keeping their talk within 12-13 minutes. After all presentations are completed, the session will move to the Q&A session.
The panelists are researchers specializing in diverse literary genres and are at different career stages. While three speakers are graduate students, aspiring and emerging scholars in their respective fields, one is a specialist, critic, and experienced academic. They will focus on close reading, interpretation, and analysis of their selected texts connecting them with the panel's theoretical landscape. They address the “scattered hegemonies” or heterogeneous experiences of marginalization in their talks. Thus, it adds voices to the existing literature and thereby expands its periphery.
Chakraborty will initiate the presentation and thus set the tone for the conversation as her paper “considers the (dis)oriented diasporic imaginaries of Bhanu Kapil’s poetry, in which the security of respectability is no longer accessible, yet other modes of being may emerge in its absence.” Her paper will critically examine how the state apparatus, social climate, and racial hatred marginalize immigrants, especially women, and how respectability fails to provide them with the life they desire, as portrayed in Bhanu Kapil’s poetry. Next speaker is Sahni. Through reading Temsüla Ao's short story collections These Hills Called Home, Laburnum for My Head, and A Tombstone in My Garden, Sahni will problematize what Chakraborty has already mentioned. Situating Temsüla Ao in the context of South-Asian diaspora, Sahni argues that “marginalized voices can shape global literary and feminist discourses.” This not only aligns his paper with Chakraborty but also adds more nuance to the talk which will be continued by Nusrat. Drawing on the work of Chandra Mohanty and Sarah Suleri, Nusrat will reflect on how “desi” Bengali women “define their identities and belonging within the multiethnic, racialized fabric of the American diaspora” through the lens of four memoirs Beloved Stranger (2014), Olive Witch (2016), Living Dhaka, Leaving Dhaka (2022), and In Sensorium (2022) written by Maria Chaudhuri, Abeer Hoque, Mehnaz Momen, and Tanwi Nandini Islam respectively. The last speaker, Mukherjee, will explore how “Faizullah juxtaposes Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment impulses towards objective information retrieval with pure sense impressions.” In doing so, she poses questions to the panel and the audience regarding whether the poetics of witness can define and contain trauma through the “information of retrieval.”
By showing how respectability politics fail to guarantee safety, how voices from the margins can forge solidarities that transcend borders, how memoir can function as a narrative strategy for articulating identity and belonging, and how the poetry of witness can struggle to convey the raw, sensory dimensions of trauma, these speakers collectively highlight a rich diversity of voices—across genres, national backgrounds, and modes of poetic expression.