30 Apr “In Search of Bengali Harlem” Broadcast & Streaming Premiere on PBS/WORLD Channel’s America ReFramed
On May 9th at 8PM, tune in for a journey through history and heritage with the Broadcast & Streaming Premiere of the award-winning documentary ‘In Search of Bengali Harlem‘, a film directed by ODL Principal Investigator Vivek Bald and edited by CMS/ODL alum Beyza Boyacioglu. Don’t miss this opportunity to explore the vibrant narratives of immigrant experiences exclusively on PBS/WORLD Channel’s America ReFramed. After the May 9th broadcast, the film will be available to stream on multiple PBS platforms.
Synopsis: As a teenager in 1980s Harlem, Alaudin Ullah was swept up in the revolutionary energy of hip-hop. He rejected his working-class Bangladeshi parents and turned his back on everything South Asian and Muslim. Now an actor and playwright facing the Islamophobia of post-9/11 Hollywood, Alaudin wants to tell his parents stories, but knows nothing of the lives they led as Muslim immigrants of an earlier era.
In Search of Bengali Harlem follows Alaudin from the streets of New York City to the villages of Bangladesh to unearth the pasts of his father, Habib, and mother, Mohima. Alaudin discovers an extraordinary history of mid-20th century Harlem in which his father and hundreds of other Bengali men dodged racist Asian Exclusion laws and married into African American and Puerto Rican communities.
Then, after crossing the globe, Alaudin learns unsettling truths about his mother: about the hardships and trauma that she overcame to become one of the first women to migrate to the U.S. from rural Bangladesh. In Search of Bengali Harlem is a transformative journey, not just for Alaudin, but for our understanding of the complex histories of South Asians and Muslims in the United States.
In Search of Bengali Harlem will have its PBS broadcast and streaming premiere on Thursday May 9th at 8PM on the WORLD Channel’s documentary series, America ReFramed.
How to Watch:
http://bengaliharlem.com/
Learn more:
http://bengaliharlem.com
https://to.worldchannel.org/
Bio: Vivek Bald is the ODL principal investigator, scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His films include “Taxi-vala/Auto-biography,” (1994) which explored the lives, struggles, and activism of New York City taxi drivers from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and “Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music” (2003) a hybrid music documentary/social documentary about South Asian youth, music, and anti-racist politics in 1970s-90s Britain. In Search of Bengali Harlem is part of a transmedia project aimed at recovering the histories of peddlers and steamship workers from British colonial India who came to the United States under the shadows of anti-Asian immigration laws and settled within U.S. communities of color in the early 20th century. The other components of the project are the Bengali Harlem book and a community oral history website that is currently in development.