March 20, 2014, 4-5:30pm
Room 120, Institute for Asian Research
The second speaker in the “Itineraries of Empire” Series is Falguni Sheth (Hampshire College)
Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP for the event.
“Precarious Journeys: Diaspora, and Vulnerabity and Racial Complexity”
What propelled South Asian men and Mexican women to marry at the turn of the 20th century? What rendered them eligible to marry during a time where anti-miscegenation law prevailed? Why were Mexican women less vulnerable to deportation than their Punjabi spouses? Using a framework called “interstitiality,” I explore the conceptual contours and political lessons learned through the example of “Punjabi Mexicans” living in California and the Southwestern US. I consider the political and racial histories of “diasporic” subjects with regard to the political and racial dynamics of intra-group tensions, alliances, and divergences of interest. The interstitiality framework becomes attuned to the interstices of laws, institutions, and geopolitical circumstances that are the often invisible and yet crucial backdrop that help shape the self-understandings and interests of diasporic/minority subjects.
Falguni A. Sheth holds a PhD in Philosophy. She works in the areas of continental philosophy, political philosophy and legal theory, critical race theory and philosophy of race, post-colonial, theory, and sub-altern and gender studies. She has published numerous articles and two books, Race, Liberalism, and Economics (coedited, U. Michigan Press, 2004) and Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (SUNY Press, 2009). Her last book argues that racial divisions are fundamental to polities, and argues this point through the examples by exploring the situation of Muslims and Arabs, the caste system, the practice of veiling, and the history of liberalism.
Sheth’s current research is in philosophy of race and political philosophy; specifically, in exploring diasporic subjects and the dynamics of intragroup and transnational political identities; the nature of political obligations to those inside and outside the polity; the emergence and legal construction of Punjabi-Mexicans at the turn of the 20th century; and the metaphysics of misrecognition. Sheth is a contributing writer to Salon.com. She is an organizer of the California Roundtable for Philosophy and Race, and has served on the Immigrant Rights Commission of San Francisco.