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The 2024 °®åú´«Ã½ Caribbean Studies Symposium features a talk by °®åú´«Ã½ faculty member, Professor Usha Iyer (Film and Media Studies) who will present from their book project, Jammin’: Black and Brown Media Intimacies between India and the Caribbean. Through analyses of film, music, and social media, this talk will discuss the intimacies and frictions that have developed around the legacies of African enslavement and Indian indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, and Guyana. Dr. Iyer is the Faculty Coordinator of the CCSRE Research Network, Black and Brown Intimacies across Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean.

RSVP required. RSVP . Zoom information available for RSVPs. Food and wine will be provided to the in person attendees.

About the Speaker

Usha Iyer is an Assistant Professor in the Art and Art History Department at °®åú´«Ã½. Their research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of cinema, performance, and gender and sexuality studies, with a specific focus on Global South cultural traffic along the vectors of race, gender, caste, and religion. Iyer (she/they) is the author of  (Oxford University Press, 2020), which examines constructions of gender, stardom, sexuality, and spectacle in Hindi cinema through women’s labor, collaborative networks, and gestural genealogies to produce a corporeal history of South Asian cultural modernities. Iyer’s current book project, Jammin’: Black and Brown Media Intimacies between India and the Caribbean (under contract with Columbia University Press), studies the deep affective engagement of Caribbean spectators with Indian cinema in relation to discourses of belonging and citizenship that have developed around the histories of African enslavement and Indian indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, and Guyana. The book equally attends to the impact of Caribbean cultural forms on Indian film industries, which, through pirate and informal networks appropriated and adapted soca, chutney, and other musical and performance forms that were products of a creole modernity.  Iyer is co-editing with Manishita Dass the volume, Shift Focus: Reframing the Indian New Waves (under contract with Oxford University Press). This anthology brings together a diverse group of scholars to examine the unexplored cultural, political, and aesthetic genealogies, impulses, and resonances of the Indian New Waves. Iyer is the Annenberg Faculty Fellow, School of the Humanities and Sciences (2022-2024), and serves as affiliate faculty in °®åú´«Ã½'s Center for South Asia, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), and in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS) program. Their research has been supported by fellowships from The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, °®åú´«Ã½ Humanities Center, Clayman Institute of Gender Research, CCSRE, FGSS, and °®åú´«Ã½ Global Studies. 

Publicity spoonsered by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages