DLC Funded Research

Phase 2 of this project is to complete the identification, assembly, and purchase of permissions to publish up to sixteen images of the social and conflict history of the China-Burma-India frontier in the 1940s; these images will be used in a forthcoming book called “Guerilla Warfare and the Anthropologists” scheduled for publication by Routledge. In addition to the book, these images will be used in as many other public ways as permitted (eg displayed on David Lam Centre’s website if invited, projected in a conference involving researchers in studies of guerilla warfare and anthropology, etc. [An example of such an image is seen on the last page of this application.] This will be followed in FY 2024-2025 with a multi-site workshop, using these images to appraise difficulties in the legal use of images in research in studies of the Asia Pacific region.

Remaking a home in the diaspora is a complex phenomenon, entailing dynamic relationship between socio-political factors and agentive interventions. Protracted violence (1979-2021) in Afghanistan presents an illustrative case-study. Over the course of my research within Afghanistan and its diaspora, I observed multiple ways in which women remake their home ingeniously such as resorting to minimalist meals, converting one-bedroom home into a sitting room for guests during daytime, and fostering mutual relationships with kith and kin. When some of the women migrated to Vancouver (Canada), they employed their experiential knowledge on remaking a home in a country where they are racialized as the Other. This is partly because the superpowers have not acknowledged their role in displacing the people of Afghanistan, the site for waging of the Cold War (1978-1989) and later through U.S./NATO military occupation (2001-2021), [Dossa 2014, 2022]. My preliminary research in the diaspora has brought to light multiple ways in which women remake their homes, metaphorically captured through “The fire of the hearth will not be extinguished.” I draw inspiration from Ayesha whom I met in Afghanistan (09/2009). Upon taking her photo, she said: “Sit with the women and listen to their stories. Each woman will tell you how violence has impacted our lives. Once you have collected their stories, imagine them as forming part of a tapestry. The tapestry will not be complete until Afghanistan [and its diaspora] is rebuilt by its people, not outsiders.”   

My goal then is to illuminate aspirations and imaginings of Afghan women. Remaking a home evokes emotional attachments to places, memories, objects and relationships. Experienced in the context of everyday life, it does not lend itself to static conceptions. The ongoing process of remaking a home then calls for critical genres such as poetry, metaphors, and photo-storying. In this project, I will focus on the latter, inclusive of women’s drawings. Photography/drawings enables us to feel, listen, think, and validate stories that otherwise remain buried. As a visual language, this genre exceeds the bounds of what is photographed - the seen, the unseen and the spaces in-between. Other than capturing constitutive moments of opportunities of what could be shared and interconnected lives across space and time, photo-storying engages a larger audience, including stakeholders.

I propose a pilot research project to capture oral histories of queer people who travelled and/or immigrated from India to Canada between the 1970s till the 1990s. This period witnessed significant Indian migrations to Canada, UK, US, often via Hong Kong, Singapore and other hubs of global capital. But the portrayal of the cultural realities of the Indian diaspora in this period seems markedly heteronormative. For instance, official records, popular media or academia have rarely talked about what transpired at the individual, family or community levels, say, when an Indian queer person met their Canadian counterpart in Canada and both fell in love with each other; when an Indian queer person participated in a pride march or a queer support group in Canada and talked about it to queer friends in India. The study seeks to capture these realities through interviews and queer archival research to document queer exchanges in a pre-internet period, histories that are otherwise unstudied in both countries. In the process it will highlight how the globalization of queerness was a dynamic process rather than one that originated in the West and exported to the Rest.     

The proposed research will collect oral narratives from queer people who travelled between Canada and India in the period between 1970s and the late 1990s to track how they carried information, stories, and cultural artifacts that informed the political and personal aspirations of queer people in India. The project is situated between the queer social movements that began in the 1970s in the Euro-West and the online archives that the internet has made possible in India, to examine how changes of the 1970s, 80s and 90s in the understanding of sexuality, citizenship, pleasure and desire were reported, felt, and experienced by queer people in India. An oral history of encounters between queer people both in Canada and in India in these decades will destabilize a linear, evolutionary, unfolding of a liberal social movement that first began in the West with the Rest catching up decades later. A few interviews that I have collected to date show that there was substantial interaction of queer people between the urban centers of India and Canada who carried with them information, ideas, and intimacies that had an impact on how queerness was experienced. For example, one activist mentioned that a queer pilot would smuggle gay pornography from Canada to India which changed the way queer sex was imagined for his friends and lovers. Collecting such stories and histories will show that a political awareness of being queer was long present before the hypervisibility made possible by the Internet.