2023 Chandni Kumar Annual Lecture on Asian Americans and Activism ft. Dr. Sam Vong and Thakur Mishra

The three will touch upon community engagement within South Asian America and Bhutanese refugee communities in particular, public history, and how to bridge the work of local storytellers with cultural institutions like the Smithsonian.

In this presentation, Dr. Iqbal will discuss Islam’s novel Bright Lines, exploring how tradition, modernity, immodesty, and the imperatives of domesticity confront one another throughout the novel. He will shed some light on what it means to live an American life as a Bangladeshi and the novel’s engagement with the experience of living between home and a landscape that in many ways is foreign to the characters of the novel.