My scholarship revolves around the cultural histories and socio-political legacies of modern migrations, and is located at the intersection of Postcolonial Studies, Asian American Studies, feminist critique, and critical race theory. My work examines how migrations generate forms of postcolonial belonging and unbelonging in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in Asia, Africa, and the United States. In its sustained commitment to how gender and sexuality shape the public sphere negotiation of citizenship, nationalism, intimacy, and human rights I work on, my scholarship also contributes to transnational Gender and Sexuality Studies.

 

I am especially interested in how geopolitical conflict and displacement have shaped the cultural imagination of belonging and gendered identity in Asia and North America, and how literature and media cultures become sites for contestation and critique. In this sense, my scholarly and public writing focuses on the cultural inscription and ecological footprint of violence and displacement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My first book Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender and National Culture in Colonial India (Philadelphia: Temple UP, [2008] 2011; New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2013) illuminated how ethnic violence after decolonization and the 1947 Partition of India influences ideas about Indian nationalism from 1947-2008. My second book Graphic Migrations: Precarity and Gender in India and the Diaspora (forthcoming, Temple UP, 2020), links India and its north American diaspora; it offers a feminist analysis of how geopolitical displacement and refugee experience are narrated in South Asian and Asian American public culture across a range of media, from literature, film, photography, print culture, and art. 

 

My interest in transmedia and public culture as sites for socio-political critique also led to my edited volume Graphic Narratives about South Asian and South Asian America: Aesthetics and Politics (Routledge, 2019), which is the first edited volume to document the interventionist, critical energy of South Asian graphic narratives on issues like gender based violence, ecological justice, authoritarianism, and colonialism, among others. Recent articles and reviews have appeared in edited volumes as well as journals like PMLA, Genders, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, American Book Review, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of South Asian History and Culture, among others. My interest in how digital media can be used to advance story-telling and memorialization of the mid-twentieth century’s global histories of war and displacement have led to my work as a member of the Founding Board of Directors of the 1947PartitionArchive.org. I am currently working on my third book, which focuses on gender, race, and media cultures in Asia and Asian America.