Vivek Bald | Documenting the Undocumented: Bengali Muslim Migrants In and Beyond 20th Century U.S. Archives

The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley is delighted to welcome scholar, writer, documentary filmmaker and Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media at MIT, Vivek Bald. 

Vivek Bald is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His films include Taxi-vala/Auto-biography, (1994) which explored the lives, struggles, and activism of New York City taxi drivers from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music(2003) a hybrid music documentary/social documentary about South Asian youth, music, and anti-racist politics in 1970s-90s Britain. Bald is currently working on a transmedia project aimed at recovering the histories of peddlers and steamship workers from British colonial India who came to the United States under the shadows of anti-Asian immigration laws and settled within U.S. communities of color in the early 20th century. The project consists of the Bengali Harlem book as well as a documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem, (currently in production), and a digital oral history website in development at bengaliharlem.com.

Event is free and open to the public.