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| Transdiasporic Art Practices: A Curatorial Framework 2007 The Transdiaspora Project is an on-going curatorial project, comprised of a series of annual art exhibits, and related publications. In this paper, I critique current trends in curatorial practices with regards to diaspora exhibits. Drawing on visual studies, identity scholarship, and coalitional politics, the "Transdiaspora"TM paradigm for curating diaspora art exhibits seeks to make transverse and horizontal connections between artists operating from multiple diasporic locations. By taking a multi-diasporic and multi-ethnic approach, Transdiaspora exhibits emphasize continuities across multiple communities. The framework also includes deterritorialized diasporas such as Queer diasporas, Native diasporas, Crip diasporas, etc. to include artists from non-traditional diasporic and exilic locations as well. Being a neologism, the paper proposes a rigorous definition for the term, “Transdiaspora” in this paper. |
| Queering Mother India: Mining Memories of Partition 2008 In this paper, I situate the heteropatriarchal iconography of Mother India historically, and the part it has played in nationalist rhetoric in the South Asian sub-continent. Interrogating various definitions of the term “queer” I discuss how they may be applied to the bodies of the abducted and raped women in the Partition riots. Using Paola Bachhetta’s work linking queerphobia, xenophobia, and misogyny in Hindu nationalist politics, and Gayatri Gopinath’s concept of queer diasporas within and outside the nation, I examine the tenuous location of the recovered women in the multiple registers of disavowals by the nation, community, and family. With this theoretical framework in place, I finally examine the feasibility of memorializing the Partition given the various gaps in historical and personal memories of the events of that time, and propose memorializing strategies that become possible by deploying a “queered” Mother India in the space of the diaspora. |
| Partition in Contemporary Visual Art: A Transnational Memory Discourse 2009 A strong transnational trajectory in contemporary visual arts is emerging that critically engages cultural memories of historical traumas. However, the discourse of cultural memory, at least in the West, is centered on the Holocaust and the Middle Passage. In this paper, I argue that it is time to re-center the cultural memory discourse to focus on events that have happened elsewhere in the world. For example, the Partition of India as an event does not yet figure in a serious way in the discourse of cultural memory or of contemporary art on the international scene. In this essay, I will propose that Stephen Legg’s idea of “Subaltern memory” can be productively deployed to recenter and relocate the current memory discourse to non-western regions, by examining the artistic practices of South Asian artists whose works allude to memories of the Partition. |
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