I thought I’d saunter away to the musical stylings of a well-known white man with connections to the mafia. ’Cause that makes sense for this desi blog.

Just kidding. I thought I’d go out myyyyyyyy way. With a point, or attempting to make one. I aim for rallying cry rather than dirge, in keeping with my bullheaded desire to cultivate optimism and seek action.

So here are some things that are related to each other (and the optimism is coming just a ways down the pike, I swear, because most of this list of connected things is comprised of news that devastates):

• George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin recently, in Florida. I hope you already know this by now, that Martin’s name is etched in your memory, but if you don’t, here. Go you and read it. And then please sign it, and come back.

Trayvon Martin was a child, a black teenager, and he carried Skittles and iced tea and no weapon. He could have been my classmate, my relative, my friend, my colleague, my teacher, my student. He wore a hoodie. I think of my beard-sporting, turban-wearing friends. I think of the black men and black communities who have supported ­me.

Watch this brilliant and moving response from a set of Howard University guys:

I think of laws that need changing.

• Shaima Alawadi was killed recently too, found with a note that said Go back to your country, you terrorist. She was 32. She was the mother of five and wore a hijab and had immigrated from Iraq.

I think of Muslim friends, profiled. I think of Tamil friends, profiled. I think of minorities… profiled.

• An American soldier killed 17 civilians in Afghanistan. Much of the Western media failed to adequately acknowledge the dead. 

O, failures to acknowledge and mourn the dead, how you haunt me. 

• The long-awaited film of The Hunger Games prompted a slew of racist reactions from fans who couldn’t believe that black actors had been cast in roles they’d imagined white.

And good God, I think of my own job: I am a fiction writer.

And the last item on this list (which clearly could have included a great deal more)—

• Taiwanese-American Harvard alum and Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin became an international phenomenon.

Yes, I’m the Sri Lankan chick who went to Harvard, but I’m glad to say I know lots of people who cheered for him with no “connection,” with no self-interest. Because he impressed, and they admired. Without reservation.

Not all of these things are explicitly connected to anything desi. But they are related. We are related. As the collective work of Sepia Mutiny has asked others to not only know but also imagine South Asian(-Americans), the incredible variety our lives contain, I want to exit the bunker and imagine how we might be in solidarity with other people. Other Others, if you will. How can I know their lives? What do we have in common? How can I throw my lot in with those who think imagination, emotion, compassion, and respect don’t default to white, to straight, to male, to able-bodied? How can I do this rigorously, thoughtfully, with humor and humility?

I think that now, to change things, we have to go outside ourselves. Maybe Twitter killed SM; maybe Facebook slayed us. Still, I just wanted to say, I hope this isn’t just an end. I want it to be a turn, a growing. I think it will be. And of course much of this work has already begun.

Poittu Varan / I go only to return / catch you later

And so you may have noticed that I didn’t say goodbye. BECAUSE THERE ARE THINGS TO DO!

I’ve had good times here. I learned an enormous amount. I was a lurker, then a commenter, then a guest, then a regular. I felt a certain solidarity with my bunkermates, even when I disagreed with them. This feeling of being backed-up and valued counted for a lot; it made it possible for me to say things that felt difficult to say. Thanks, bunkermates. I e-mailed you, called you, chatted you and relied on you even when we hadn’t met… and you always treated me as though we had.

SM readers, in their turn, offered thought-provoking, funny, nasty, reasonable, and deeply kind responses to what I wrote. Thanks to them too. Some became real-life friends. We met in New York, Ann Arbor, other cities, other countries. They kept me honest and tested my patience. I cut my argumentative teeth on SM’s threads, made mistakes, corrected, learned, revised, edited, and hopefully improved. Those threads taught me that I didn’t need to have the last word to win an argument, and that sometimes the best response was no response. (Don’t feed the trolls!) I learned to bide my time and hold my temper. Funny thing to learn from the Internet. And hella useful.

And the Interwebs taught me about generosity, too. I particularly remember one insightful, positive, compassionate comment made about two years ago. I wasn’t familiar with the handle; I have no idea who it was. But I have returned to that comment multiple times, to remind myself that people actually did sometimes get what I was saying, that I was allowed to be human, and sometimes even to do it in public. To the readers who took the time to comment when they liked something… that mattered, and thanks so much.

So I will see you again out there again, you know, and I won’t say goodbye. I’ll say—until next time, see you soon, somewhere else, somewhere new.

I will helpfully subtitle this for you.

Amma: Eat eat eat eat eat eat eat eat eat EAT

Translation: I love you

Amma: [In this scenario] you will die; [in that scenario] you will die

Translation: If anything ever happened to you I don’t know what I’d do

Amma: If you wind up in hospital I’m not coming!

Translation: I would be there in a hot minute

The HI magazine is a nice touch. Also, since I saw this on FB, I hereby invent Sri Lankan Social Media Amma. “This one is carrying on with that one with the poking and the friending and that fellow! Have you used the Sri Lankan Foods application? Do you think this Facebook wall is your social media hotel for you to post and go as you please?”

Very good for you. You go! [update: Sh** Sri Lankan Fathers Say after jump]

Update: Appa is coming for you too. From the same team, Sh** Sri Lankan Fathers Say:

Ask not what Sepia Mutiny can do for you; ask what you can do for Sepia Mutiny! The picture above is courtesy of tipster Ashish, who ran after a bus to take this picture for us. As he notes, it is an ad in Hindi, for McDonald’s. It was on a SamTrans bus in Menlo Park this summer. I intended to put it up back when he originally sent it, because did I mention he ran after a bus for us? and also the picture is cool? but now it is cold and grey and I am glad to have just recalled this and to be posting it now, because among other things it is a nice reminder of summer and running and outdoor things. (I hope those of you on the East Coast have power and are warm and safe.)

Anyway. Hindi on the side of a bus in America, for the quintessential American fast food chain, which is now selling various South Asianish foodstuffs, by which I mean mangoes and coconuts are involved. If you have tasted any of these foodstuffs, please revert.

UPDATE: from the crowdsourcing on my FB wall—since I am not a Hindi speaker—this ad references pineapple-mango smoothies made from real fruit (the word “real” didn’t make it into the photo, so that part’s an educated guess). The ad further informs us that these smoothies are cooler than the month of August in San Francisco. Thanks to Aruni, Salil, Oindrila, Sucheta, Sumita, Zain! Oindrila offers this review of the smoothie, which she had several times this summer: “It was too much pineapple and not enough mango imo. I like my exotic cliched fruit.”

Speaking of desis at Occupy Wall Street, last week I chatted with Arun Gupta, one of the founders of the Occupied Wall Street Journal. Gupta, who talked with me on the phone from a road trip to visit different sites of protest, has been working with newspapers off and on for the past two decades, and writes for publications like AlterNet and Al Jazeera. He’s also been with the Indypendent for the past 11 years. He told me about making the first issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal happen in under 24 hours.

(Time-sensitive note for New Yorkers: If you want to hear more from Gupta, The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, is moderating a discussion about OWS tonight at Florence Gould Hall in NYC. 7 p.m. In addition to Gupta, the event features NYer staff writers John Cassidy and Jill Lepore, as well as former NY governor Eliot Spitzer. Online tickets are gone, but a limited number of free tickets will be available at the door.) And a BONUS read via Sonny Singh: Manissa McCleave Maharawal in conversation with Eliot Spitzer about OWS in NYMag, here. I blogged about Manissa earlier in this series.)

Gupta is no longer involved with the publication—he said he needs to refocus on the Indypendent, as well as his road trip to see all the different Occupy protests. But he told me a little bit about the founding of the newspaper, which he called the only polished media outlet in terms of getting out the perspectives of the people in Zuccotti Park.

At first, OWSJ’s founders wanted to pursue publishing the newspaper via the processes afforded by the protest’s General Assembly, or its media working group. However, he said, they quickly realized this wouldn’t work: agreeing on messaging would be too difficult and slow for a publication to react to events quickly. “There’s a value to having this media where you can react in real time,” he said. So instead, they set it up as an affinity group that operated autonomously and by consensus; technically, the OWSJ is not an official publication of OWS.

The first issue, Gupta said, wasn’t too hard to do, because it was put together with the aid of preexisting content and some strong photographers. It was funded via a Kickstarter campaign that aimed for $12,000 in 10 days and instead raked in $75,000. “It was just a wild success,” he said. (Each issue costs $4,000 to $5,000.) An artist contacted them to work on a spread of people holding signs. The resulting publication was a four-page tabloid. (See links to the past three issues of the Occupied Wall Street Journal here.)

At that size, Gupta would prefer to see it come out more frequently, perhaps with two issues a week, but publication has slowed. (Issues came out Oct. 1, Oct. 8, and Oct. 22. I spoke to Gupta after the second issue had come out, but before the third.) “Things can change dramatically within a couple of days down there,” he said. “I think you have to engage with the public in a regular fashion.”

Experience with the Indypendent led them to believe that a free print publication was the best way to connect with a large audience. “As print disappears the more important individual publications become, especially if you’re doing real journalism…. The public is hungry for real journalism,” he said. Subscriber-based publications and the Web are both self-selecting, he added, but of course, a free publication reaches a wider audience. The first issue’s first printing was 50,000 copies; a second printing added another 20,000. The second issue was another 50,000; they also printed 20,000 copies of a Spanish-language translation of the first issue.

Experience with the Indypendent led them to believe that a free print publication was the best way to connect with a large audience.

Now that he has stepped back from helping with the OWSJ, he is traveling around with the aim of interviewing Occupy protestors. I asked him what he was hearing and seeing in different spots. He noted the wide range of opinions. People he has interviewed at various sites agreement that something wasn’t working, he said, but opinions on solutions varied wildly. “I think this movement has a lot of potential to affect social, cultural, and ideological change, but it’s going to take a logn time for it to do that,” he said. He added that in recent years, some leftists movements have appeared and disappeared quickly; he posited that the left often struggles to get the resources that would sustain such change. Leftist groups “certainly punch above their weight, but still the resources are just so small and everyone is scraping for every penny they can get,” he added. For OWS to be different will take time.

*

When—in light of my previous posts about the people of color working group and some of its members—I asked him about race and the protests, he referenced his recent appearance on Democracy Now, where he faced off against Kai Wright. (As Unions, Students Join Occupy Wall Street, Are We Witnessing Growth of a New Movement? (Democracy Now video, featuring Arun Gupta and Kai Wright, plus transcript).) An excerpt from a piece Wright penned for Colorlines prior to the Democracy Now appearance (and which he annotated later):

There are literally millions of people who have been kicked out of their homes, laid off or forced to work multiple part-time jobs, caught in predatory debt traps and, yes, so harassed by cops that they have petty criminal records that make them unemployable. These millions are neither lobbying Congress nor marching across the Brooklyn Bridge; they’re trying to make it through the week without another crisis. They are also overwhelmingly and not in the least bit coincidentally black people. And I suspect that until we build our politics around their participation, we will continue to miss the point. Everyone will continue to suffer as a result. Well, everyone except the Wall Street fat cats who have gone right on with their theft throughout their occupation. [full piece, Here's to Occupying Wall Street! (If Only That Were Actually Happening)]

Gupta argued that Wright’s take missed the point of the protests, which have no leadership to do the sort of outreach Wright suggests; instead, Gupta said, OWS has created a space. Early on, the protestors counted few New Yorkers and few people of color among their number; now, he said, New Yorkers and people of color are organizing and using the huge platform that OWS affords. “Yes, if you go down there you are going to be dealing with people’s white-skin privilege, but so what?” he asked. “We have to struggle with this and deal with it”—engage in a principled fashion, he added, not sit on the sidelines or dismiss it. When he went to the protests in its earliest days, he said, it did not include many members of the New York left. “The movement was a rejoinder to everyone’s failed politics,” he said. “I include the left in this.”

Related links:

Occupying, and Now Publishing, Too (NYT.com)

India Abroad cover, featuring desis at Occupy Wall Street (including Sonny Singh!) and more Arun Gupta in the associated story

Personal sidenote: I recently signed on to OccupyWriters. Check out the full list of signatories and original works by Francine Prose, Lemony Snicket, D.A. Powell, Duncan Murrell, Anne Waldman, Danica Novgorodoff and Michael Voll, Maureen Miller, Daphne Carr, Alice Walker, Paula Z. Segal, John McManus, David Hollander, Blair Braverman, Scott Sparling, and Joshua Cohen at Occupy Writers.

When I first talked to Sonny Singh, Thanu Yakupitage, Manissa McCleave Maharawal and Hena Ashraf about two weeks ago, Occupy Wall Street was just gaining steam, and I was newly intrigued by what I’d heard of the quartet’s intervention to eliminate post-racial language from the OWS declaration.

Talking about one of her earliest visits to the protests, Manissa McCleave Maharawal told me, “It felt like a space where people were talking about things.”  But, she added, “it needs to be thinking about the role of people of color.” When the post-racial language came up, she said, “I think there was an urgency to it.

“I didn’t want that line to be published because I knew that it would prevent me from being as fully on board with this movement as I had been, and it would prevent other people like me from getting fully on board,” she said. “I want to be able to bring my people down here.”

And eventually, they did. A recent POC working group meeting saw more than 100 attendees. Maharawal, a longtime activist who is also a CUNY anthropology graduate student, says part of the protest’s appeal for her has been the pull of the space. “It feels like it’s changing all the time,” she added. “It feels organized and disorganized at once.”

And, she added, it also felt open to growth. While the change didn’t go through without debate, by fighting for it, they were able to get it done. For Maharawal, who had never spoken in front of such a large group before, it was intense—especially because these were people she wanted on her side. “I don’t think any one of us would have been able to do that if there hadn’t been five or us there, four of us there—it was so important that we were all together,” she said.

Thanu Yakupitiyage had gone to the General Assembly the evening before the intervention and heard one person talk about the need to be in solidarity with people of color, with queer people. “But I didn’t see that reflected in who was speaking,” she said. The post-racial language caught the attention of the four of them, as well as a few others.

“It was trying to talk about unity but it was completely negating and neglecting the experiences of oppressed people,” she said. “Why in order to be completely united do we need to erase difference? …What bothered me about that paragraph was that I didn’t think that this was a movement that could grow if it was starting from such a naïve place…. If you want to use the slogan ‘another world is possible’ you have to acknowledge the realities of today.”

To get their change passed, the four of them had to declare it as an “ethical objection.” Hundreds of people turned to look at them. “We were so visible,” Yakupitiyage recalled.

UPDATE, FRIDAY MORNING: Brookfield, the private owner of the park, has postponed the cleaning. See a story on The New York Times website. However, my own Facebook feed still has information about confrontations between police and protestors… Waiting for more. Reuters has a blog of Occupy events in different locations: see this. 

Are you at Occupy Wall Street or another protest? Send us your images and tell us what’s in them: v_v@sepiamutiny.com

Story to be continued…

a video about people at the protests one week ago, courtesy of Thanu Yakupitiyage

“We must not miss the chance to put the needs of people of color—upon whose backs this country was built—at the forefront of this struggle.”

—from CALL OUT TO PEOPLE OF COLOR from the #OWS POC Working Group

How Hena Got There

Two Thursdays ago, after Troy Davis had been executed, Hena Ashraf protested his killing at a rally in New York City. The group that she was with didn’t have a particular plan, she says, but “we ended up on Wall Street.”

It was her first time at Occupy Wall Street, a movement that’s rapidly gaining steam and numbers. And a week ago, by her fourth time there, Ashraf had become a game-changer: one of a group of desis who stood up and insisted that the movement’s primary declaration edit language that referred to racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination as though they were things of the past.

“We definitely stood out,” Ashraf told me. At that point, she explained, the protests were still overwhelmingly white. (We spoke on the phone Sunday night; she was two blocks from Wall Street, heading back to the protests.) But, she added, over the course of her visits to the site, she’s seen them become more diverse.

Ashraf, an independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, has been involved in activism before, but says Occupy Wall Street is “not like anything I’ve ever seen before.”

“The atmosphere is very electric. Anything can happen. There’s so much potential for it,” she says. One of its key strengths, she adds, is that there’s no central leadership, no one trying to dictate what should be said. That meant that when Ashraf, Sonny Singh, Thanu Yakupitiyage and Manissa McCleave Maharawal met up at the protests a week ago, they could jump right in and make a change.

“What happened on Thursday was crazy and intense and amazing,” Ashraf says. “I’m going to keep coming back. We have to keep coming back now, after what happened on Thursday, because what we did had such a huge effect.”

Solidarity and critique aren’t opposites, she notes. “I think solidarity and critique can go together,” she says. “Constructive criticism can also be a good thing.”

Part 1 here: Desis Take Action At Occupy Wall Street

Related links:

• Reflections on Occupy Wall Street from Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, a hip-hop community center in the South Bronx (h/t Thanu)
• Wall Street Protests Spread, Channeling Anger at Corporate, Political Forces | PBS NewsHour (Arun Venugopal on Occupy Wall Street)
• We Are All Human Microphones Now, from The Nation, h/t Naeem Mohaiemen
• Occupy Wall Street POC affinity group, h/t Naeem Mohaiemen
• De-Colonize Wall Street, by Vijay Prashad, in Counterpunch
• Here’s to Occupying Wall Street! (If Only That Were Actually Happening) from Colorlines

Twitter

• Thanu Yakupitiyage on Twitter
• Anjali Mullany, social media editor of the New York Daily News, on Twitter
• Arun Venugopal of WNYC on Twitter

I no longer live in New York, and I was following the Occupy Wall Street movement only vaguely when last week, something on FB caught my attention… and kept it. It was a lengthy note by Hena Ashraf, chronicling how she and a few other desis had gone down to Liberty Square on Thursday night and argued to change some of the language in Occupy Wall Street’s primary declaration.

I recognized some of the names in her story from my own time in New York: Sonny Singh (of, among other things, Red Baraat) and Thanu Yakupitiyage, an immigrant rights activist who is also a Lanka Solidarity member. And another, whom I didn’t know: Manissa McCleave Maharawal. These four, it seemed, had formed the posse primarily responsible for the intervention that had me riveted.

Here’s how it looks in the Occupy Wall Street notes:

Block 4—Grievance in supporting a document that claims that my oppression on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, religion, and things not mentioned on this document are something that happened formerly and not in the present day.

Response: This can be addressed.  The document says that these divisions have formerly happened.  We know they happen now, that’s why we’re writing it this way.  This document is saying “we want to leave this shit in the past where it belongs to create a new America, world, new society, where everyone is equal.”  We do not mean to ignore present-day issues.  It was drafted so we can leave that behind.

Block 5—That phrase erases so much history of oppression, it is idealistic, not realistic.  We still think it should be changed, and we think it’s an ethical issue.

Response: Rephrase, “formerly divided” so we can have what you would like to see written.  Then the working group can decide whether we want to move to consensus without it.

Let’s all relax!

We appreciate the process, we appreciate everything you’ve done, we want a small verb change, we feel it is an ethical matter.

“As one people, despite divisions of color of our skin…”

Response: We’re fine with that.  Let’s meet after and decide which phrasing to use.

Block withdrawn.

And here’s a snippet of what it felt like, from Manissa’s point of view:

Let me tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a white man and explain privilege to him. It hurts. It makes you tired. Sometimes it makes you want to cry. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Every single time it is hard. Every single time I get angry that I have to do this, that this is my job, that this shouldn’t be my job. Every single time I am proud of myself that I’ve been able to say these things because I used to not be able to and because some days I just don’t want to. 

And from Hena’s:

Long story short, we got the paragraph changed to adequately address our concerns that it reflect issues around dynamics of power and privilege that marginalized people feel every single day. This was a very hard discussion to have, and it felt so real, it hurt. It hurt that it had to happen, it hurt that we had to explain what is really behind racism to this man, and the people around him, it hurt that so many tried to disrupt us. But at the same time, we were meant to be there, meant to be heard, to make this happen, to make these changes occur. And there were a lot of people sitting there and listening in and contributing constructively. We walked away realizing what we had just done – spontaneously come together, demand change, and create it, in a movement that we are in solidarity with, but also feel a need for constructive criticism.

How many activities and movements or even conversations have I forgone, thinking that they had no space for me? How many times have I thought that some purportedly progressive activity wasn’t even considering anyone like me? How many times have I walked away, rather than saying anything, because I was bone-tired?

Thanu-Sonny-Manissa-Hena-anyone else who was there: THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU—

I can’t embed this one, but if you go to about the 53:30 mark, you can actually see the post-General Assembly discussion (thanks, Manissa, for pointing this out).

All four of them chatted with me, so stay tuned for an update, or Part II!

I love me some primary sources/historical material, so imagine my delight when I discovered the South Asian American Digital Archive, which I first heard about from a friend of Vivek’s. You can get lost on this site for many hours, looking at everything from the Gadar Party to old SM favorite Dilip Singh Saund (and by the way, I would like a dollar for every time he has been mentioned on SM).

It turned out that Vivek’s pal, SAADA President Samip Mallick, was working on SAADA with, among other people, a friend of a friend of mine, Manan Desai. The two of them agreed to do an interview about it for Sepia. This interview was conducted via the standard Interwebs.VVG: Thanks so much for doing this chat. As you know, I think this is a really cool project–I’m the kind of person who can fall into the wormhole of the Internet pretty quickly, especially when it comes to Fun Historical Facts (or… Less Fun Historical Facts From Which We Might Learn). This site has such great potential… can you tell us a little bit about how you got started?

Samip Mallick (SM): Sugi, thanks so much for inviting us! Our organization, the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) was started in 2008 based on what we saw as a very critical need in our community. There were at that time… and continue to be to this day… no other archives that are working to systematically document and preserve the history of the South Asian American community. And, as a result, we feared that this important history was in danger of being lost. Our mission is not just to document and preserve the history of our community, but also to ensure that these histories are more widely known to everyone, especially within our own community. It seems like we’re always coming across really fascinating stories that we just had no clue about. And we feel like having a greater understanding of the history of our community will give us a better sense of not just who we were, but of who we are today and who we aspire to be.

Manan Desai (MD): I agree, and I think accessibility is one of the central ideas behind our project. There’s something really gratifying about providing access to historical materials directly to the public without a great deal of mediation. Our goal is to allow the reader to confront and understand the material for her or himself.

VVG: What are your personal favorites in this collection? I got a kick out of seeing a younger version of SM’s own Taz, working for SAAVY. I also love seeing the history connected to the University of Michigan, of course, since I teach there (and you’re both connected to the university too)… “The India Society of Detroit” info was pretty awesome. What were the biggest surprises for you as you started gathering material?

MD: “The India Society of Detroit” material was really interesting and totally surprising. Having grown up outside of Detroit, I didn’t expect to see such an early presence of South Asians in the city all the way back in 1911, let alone read about it in a Calcutta-based publication like the Modern Review. We’re trying to follow that trail even further.

Building our Gadar Party collection has been really exciting, too. The Gadar Party was a radical, anti-imperialist organization based on the West Coast, which spread out internationally throughout Europe and Asia. Its membership was made up of South Asians–mainly Sikhs–agitating against British rule in India. They published a newspaper Gadar, as well as pamphlets like the ones we’ve digitized and published online. So, I hope that our collection will be valuable for raising awareness about the history of the early 20th century South Asian diaspora. [VVG: the picture at right is from the Gadar Party collection.]

SM: One of the collections that we’re processing right now is one that I’m particularly excited about because it’s a fascinating history that I just didn’t know anything about. The Watumulls are one of the first South Asian families to settle in Hawaii. Jhamandas Watumull moved to Hawaii in 1913 and opened a retail store in downtown Honolulu that would eventually be named the “East India Store.” The store flourished, selling raw silk goods and “aloha shirts” on the island, turning into a major department store, before eventually opening additional branch stores in Waikiki and in downtown Honolulu. The Watumull family also has made a huge and lasting impact on Hawaii through their philanthropic work, supporting the arts, education and other causes. We’ve been working with Mrs. Indru Watumull to document and preserve their family history and these materials are now being published online in our archive.

What was wonderful about working about the SAAVY materials is that Taz had been very diligent and forward-thinking and had carefully maintained a variety of SAAVY’s organizational materials even after her work with the organization had ended. In addition to digitally preserving and providing access to historical materials, we would also like to work closely with the community to create a greater understanding of the importance of archiving as well as what it takes to ensure that materials, both digital and non-digital, are preserved for the long term.

VVG: You guys recently sent me a note saying you’d gotten a great grant. Tell us a little about the support you’ve gotten in the past and the kind of support you’re looking for, especially from the likes of our SM readers. If someone has material they want to digitize and submit, is there a process for doing that? What makes the cut? Or are you just digitizing everything you find so far?

SM: Yes! In fact it was our first grant, which we’ve received from a local philanthropic organization in Chicago called the Asian Giving Circle (AGC). AGC members each commit to donating a minimum of $250 a year for at least two years, and the funds are then allocated in a grant competition to support organizations working within the Asian American community in Chicago. What was really wonderful for us with this grant was the opportunity to meet many of the members of the Asian Giving Circle who had given money out of their own pocket to support our mission of preserving history. The work that we do is a labor of love for all of us involved. We’re an entirely volunteer-run organization. But, of course, like other non-profit organizations, we rely on the generous financial support from those who value the work we’re doing.

We certainly are interested in working with anyone who has materials that they think should be included in the archive. And not just those who have materials themselves, but also those who’ve maybe heard a story about South Asian American history or have an idea for a collection that they think is worth documenting. The best way to get in touch with us is by email, at info@saadigitalarchive.org We’re very eager to be in contact with anyone who wants to work collaboratively with us to document and preserve South Asian American history. [VVG: emphasis mine!]

MD: Some of our more interesting collections have come from people just tipping us off about a story that we then follow. We’ve recently started a collection on the Bellingham Riot in the state of Washington, in which a white mob attacked and ousted hundreds of South Asian settlers in 1907. This archival work is being done collaboratively with Professor Paul Englesberg, who lives in Washington, has been recovering and documenting a lot of this history himself and was eager to share his findings. If anyone has an idea of something to pursue, let us know!

VVG: Relatedly, any spaces in your collections that you’d particularly like to fill? Any challenges with any particular communities or types of material?

MD: There are still a lot of gaps to fill. For one, there’s a real, ethical obligation for our generation to document the struggles of South Asian communities, and particularly Muslim and Sikh communities in the aftermath of 9/11. We’ve actually recently begun working with SAALT (South Asian Americans Leading Together) to do just that.

It’d be also incredible if we could do larger collections on some key South Asian enclaves in the U.S.–Jackson Heights, Edison, Hamtramck, Devon Avenue. We are also mindful that South Asian American can easily become an euphemism for Indian American, and we’d like to avoid that by recognizing the diversity in our community and being engaged with the community at the broadest possible level.

VVG: I really appreciate your conceiving and executing this as a South Asian American project. What led to it being framed that way, rather than around any one specific community, ethnicity or nationality?

MD:One of the aims of SAADA was to investigate the history of South Asians in the United States in terms that are more specific and grounded than dominant narratives that have rendered the community into one homogeneous group. The category “South Asian American” isn’t perfect, but our aim in using it is simply to be as inclusive as possible.

That said, I think the process of collecting and discovering materials about how South Asian communities have framed their identity through different categories — ethnic, national, caste, religious, regional, etc.–can really tell us a lot about how identity is negotiated and re-invented in the United States. Not to mention, how the state and the media have produced their own categories for South Asians–you can really see this in our collections of materials about early immigration. [VVG: The pictures below are from the early immigration collection.]

VVG: Where would you like this project to be in ten years?

SM: First and foremost, as an archive we enter into a bond of trust with the community we serve to ensure that the digital materials in our possession are well taken care of and preserved. As those who’ve dealt with anything digital are very well aware, technology and software are changing at a breakneck speed. That will be plainly evident, for example, if you try to open a Pagemaker file or access a Geocities website. As a digital archive one of our primary concerns is to ensure that even if software changes or the way people visit our archive changes, the digital materials we care for will still be accessible to the public.

Our other major goal is to work closely with the South Asian American community to ensure not just that we do a better job of documenting, preserving and providing access to our history, but to work together to ensure that our stories are told and retold for future generations.

This is a video of 14-year-old Anika Tabovaradan giving an impassioned speech about the need for libraries in Toronto. It is 2 a.m., she hates public speaking, she’s been waiting for four hours to talk, and a bunch of Toronto officials–including Mayor Rob Ford–are watching her. AND SHE IS AWESOME.

Way to go, Anika. You reminded me how much I love libraries, librarians, and community space.

(Here’s the related article in the Toronto Star, and a tip o’ the old hat to Romesh H, who pointed out the vid in the first place.)

The U.K.’s Channel 4 has produced a much-discussed film called “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields,” which is about the way the Sri Lankan civil war ended in 2009. “The programme features devastating new video evidence of war crimes – some of the most horrific footage Channel 4 has ever broadcast,” Channel 4 says. I’d recommend watching it; all signs are that it’s going to be a part of the conversation for awhile, and the official link is only up for four more days (there are a few unofficial links in other spots, but who knows how or if that will continue).

Link to the film (please be forewarned that it contains a considerable amount of extremely graphic material–to quote Channel 4, “With disturbing and distressing descriptions and film of executions, atrocities and the shelling of civilians”):

Link to related interviews on PBS NewsHour, which includes the Sri Lankan Ambassador to the U.S., as well as someone from the International Crisis Group–

A link to a recent report from an advisory panel to the U.N. Secretary General

You can find analysis of these items, particularly the first and the third, in various spots on the Interwebs… but lots is still coming out, and it’s too early to know which pieces I find particularly strong. Sri Lanka citizen journalism site Groundviews, of course, will be one option. My purpose here is mostly to say that if you’re interested in forming your own opinion, you have a limited time to check out the movie itself. (That URL works all over the world.)