15 Mar 3/6/18 Vivek Bald

Posted at 18:10h in Lecture Series, Past Lectures by

In conversation with:

MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing Faculty Member Vivek Bald

Tuesday | March 6 | 12:00 – 1:30 PM
MIT Open Documentary Lab | E15-318A
MIT Campus, Wiesner Building, 20 Ames Street, 3rd Floor, Cambridge MA 02139

The Bengali Harlem/Lost Histories Project

CMS faculty member, Vivek Bald, will provide an update on his ongoing documentary film, “In Search of Bengali Harlem” and its associated community storytelling platform, the “Lost Histories Project”. Both projects aim to recover and tell the stories of some of the first Muslim immigrants to settle in the USA: Bengali ship workers who deserted in NYC in the 1910s-40s, and “disappeared” into African American and Puerto Rican communities, where they married and lived their lives in the shadow of the era’s anti-Asian immigration laws (laws that the current administration has been revisiting as models for the present-day exclusion of Muslims from the USA) Bald will screen excerpts from the rough-cut of the documentary and demo the current iteration of the web platform, and discuss how the two work together as means of telling peoples’ histories, excluded from official nation-centered narratives.