Events

Diasporic Arts Series

A talk by Nimanthi Rajasingham (Colgate)

"Post/Apartheid Cartographies and the War on Terror: South Africa and England in the Writings of Ishtiyaq Shukri"

This talk will turn to South African writer of Indian descent Shtiyaq Shukri's novel, The Silent Minaret, to discuss ongoing forms of apartheid and surveillance capitalism after 9/11. Rajasingham will also explore how the novel turns to the Black Consciousness Movement to think through Political Blackness as a useful strategy for contemporary politics. 

Nimanthi Rajasingham is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at Colgate University. She completed her doctoral work at Rutgers University, and her Masters at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her book, Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka's War (2019), explores the role that colonialism, contemporary forms of globalization, and nationalism play in the production of ethnic identities and ethnic violence, as they are articulated in aesthetic content influenced by ethnographic modes and forms of inquiry. To this end, she studies popular rural festivals, female workers' theater, novels on ethnic war, theaters of trauma and violence, and protest art and literatures. Recent projects include research on South Asian diasporas in South Africa and the U.S. to explore their strategies of refusing segregation and racial domination in both countries, especially after 2001.  She co-authored Feminist Engagements with Violence: Contingent Moments from Sri Lanka, with Lisa Kois, and Rizvina De Alwis; and co-edited Constellations of Violence: Gender and Representation in South Asia with Radhika Coomaraswamy (2008).