Impossible Communities

Thursday, April 22, 2010, 6:30-8pm

@ Alumni Reading Room
Pratt Library, Brooklyn Campus

There will be an off-site reception after the panel.

A conversation on the emergence and history of a South Asian queer diaspora in NYC, and the use of party spaces as social and political interventions that help define immigrant communities in new hybrid formulations.

This event is the first event in SAWCC’s speaker series, What’s Left of SAWCC. In this inaugural speaker series, SAWCC presents talks in which the concept of “Left” will be explored, firstly through the ability to identify social spaces as political interventions and progressive politics; secondly, as a play on words, in which the idea of what is “left” is also used as a way to interrogate the archive, and finally as a more synthetic approach to redefining how artists, intellectuals and communities redefine urban spaces through cultural production. Each talk explores this theme of progressive politics and the many ways in which SAWCC links cultural production to social and political interventions. Each talk will be presented at locations that illustrate our collaborations across the city.

Panel moderators: Professor Gayatri Gopinath (NYU), featuring DJ Ashu Rai (Sholay Productions) and DJ Rekha (Basement Bhangra).

Co-sponsors for this panel include the Critical and Visual Studies, Colloquium and the Initiative of Art, Community and Social Change, (IACSC) as a part of the series, “Constructing Spaces: The Politics of Art and Community,” Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.