Local | Global Selves, Reimagined Solidarities
By Durga Rajiv Chaloli and Jorge Hernandez-Perez
On April 5, 2024, the Undergraduate Committee on Global Thought (UCGT) hosted its third annual symposium, “Local | Global Selves, Reimagined Solidarities.” The symposium was a forum to present the UCGT Core Committee members’ year-long research on diasporic identities and colonial migratory networks. The symposium was also a culmination of an “Imaginary Museum” project that the UCGT spearheaded to investigate the intersection between local and global identity formation, explore personal and family history in light of global historical processes, and question the coloniality structuring museum spaces.
The culminating symposium was a chance for the UCGT to tie strings together to make the personal and intimate meet the global and macro-historic. Research met art and storytelling, and the UCGT and symposium audience reckoned with past and present in interdisciplinary ways.
Keynote Address
The conference commenced with a keynote address from Randa Serhan, a Term Associate Professor of Sociology at Barnard College whose academic expertise spans migration, transnational, and Arab studies. During her address, Dr. Serhan presented her ethnographic findings of the weddings of diasporic Palestinians in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ireland.
A nucleus of cultural hybridity, Palestinian-Irish weddings offered a transnational space ripe for the processes of transculturation: a cultural dialogue between Irish and Palestinian loved ones, and their wedding traditions. For Palestinian weddings in the United States, Dr. Serhan applied a transnational framework; such weddings are cross-border cultural practices divergent from certain customs in the Occupied Territories, but are nonetheless an assertion of a deterritorialized Palestinian national identity.
Research Presentations
California’s Anti-Caste Discrimination Legislation and Grassroots Mobilization
Jorge Hernandez-Perez (CC25), Devika Goyal (GS25), Elena Muglia (GS25), and Cara SoHee Wreen (CC27)
One underlying question guided the first project’s research: What requirements must Indian migrant communities in California meet in order to achieve legislative change, especially in harsh, nationalistic contexts that create boundaries to the Californian polity and political power? To investigate this question, the undergraduate researchers thematically coded speeches from community-based organizations and legislators involved in the recent demise of the anti-caste discrimination bill in California.
At the symposium, Cara SoHee Wreen offered a history of the bill, from its conception in the California legislature, to the response of Hindu-American and Dalit advocates, and to its eventual veto by the California governor. Elena Muglia detailed anti-discrimination legal theories and frameworks of migrant social movements, based on a systematic review of the literature. Jorge Hernandez-Perez and Devika Goyal outlined the qualitative methodologies used, a grounded-theory thematic analysis of speeches and open letters of various stakeholders, and presented the project’s findings. They gave an account of how the upper-caste Indian diaspora weaponized economic privilege, accusations of an anti-Hindu bias inherent in the anti-caste discrimination legislation, and an American nation-building rhetoric to circumvent historically-exclusive citizenship regimes, to garner recognition from the Californian polity, and thus, to successfully lobby against the anti-caste discrimination bill.
Revolution in Diasporic Imagination: Historical Case Studies from Revolutionary Iran and the South Asian Decolonial Movement
Durga Rajiv Chaloli (GS25), Kiana Mehanian (CC25), Will Anderson (GS24), and Leonah Esteves (BC27)
The second project explored two thematically related strands to answer the question: What role does diasporic historical imagination about individuals’ countries of origin play in articulating spatially removed revolutionary rhetoric?
The first strand was archival in nature and used the South Asian American Digital Archive and the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library to explore how Indian revolutionaries in the United States demanded independence from British colonial rule, specifically within the context of the American university. By tracing the history of Taraknath Das, an Indian anticolonial revolutionary, through a close-reading of revolutionary pamphlets, books, university bulletins, letters, and other historical documents, the group investigated Das’s positionality as a diasporic revolutionary. They argued that Das’s revolutionary activity repurposed the early-20th-century U.S. university space as a paradoxical locus of both exile and political re-imagination—a space that was deeply imbricated in racial capitalism and imperialism but that also offered a sui generis spatial-temporal and epistemological distance both from the British metropole and the Indian colonial periphery.
The second strand was a comparative analysis of Iranian diasporic discourse surrounding the 1979 Revolution, and ongoing feminist uprising turned political revolution of September 2022. The researchers looked at an archived publication of the Middle East Institute and the work of current academics to understand how intellectuals of the Iranian diaspora perceive(d) internal conflict and ensuing social change, both in anticipation of revolution and retrospectively. Through a close examination of the voices at the forefront of the Iranian diaspora, and their skeptics, the group built an understanding of a demand for political dialogue and its role in the re-imagination of Iran’s future.
The Imaginary Museum
The UCGT invited and encouraged all interested members of the audience to bring an object, a book, a piece of art, a poem, or anything else that captured a part of their life story and symbolized their local-global experiences to share at the symposium. The insightful and deeply personal conversations that this sparked played an instrumental part in helping audience members with various personal experiences and different academic interests to come together, share, and learn from each other. The “Imaginary Museum” allowed symposium participants and audience members to reflect on the local and global experiences that bond us all together.