Before and beyond 1965: South Asian American History as Cross-Racial and Working Class

Bald will draw on his book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America and speak as part of the editorial collective of the collection The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power. Bengali Harlem seeks to intervene in early-20th century South Asian American historiography in several ways. It expands the focus of early histories beyond the Pacific coast to include working-class migrations, both documented and undocumented, to the U.S. Northeast, Midwest, and South. It challenges the idea that early South Asian migrants "shunned" African Americans and  sought to "claim whiteness", by recovering the stories of hundreds of South Asian Muslim men who settled and built lives within African American and Puerto Rican communities from the 1890s to the 1960s. And it challenges the historical centrality of the predominantly North Indian professionals who arrived in the U.S. after the 1965 Immigration Act, asserting instead, that working-class Muslim migration from regions of present-day Bangladesh and Pakistan has been extensive and continuous since the late 19th century. The Sun Never Sets extends and adds to these interventions, charting a South Asian American history that is not centered on the shifts and changes of U.S. state policy (the "openings" and "closings" of various immigration laws) but on the ways in which working-class migrants have navigated and challenged the ongoing constraints, and military and economic violence, of both British imperialism and U.S. led globalization.