Join us for a screening of In Search of Bengali Harlem followed by remarks and a Q & A with Vivek Bald (director, producer, writer).
This presentation is part of the Interseminars culminating event: Collisions Across Color Lines: Reconsidering Racism, Movements,
and Epistemes in the Americas. Free and open to the public.
About the Film - In Search of Bengali Harlem
As a teenager in 1980s Harlem, Alaudin Ullah was swept up in the revolutionary energy of early hip-hop. He rejected his working-class Bangladeshi parents and turned his back on everything South Asian and Muslim. Now, as an actor and playwright in post-9/11 America, Alaudin wants to tell his parents' stories, but has no idea of the lives they led as Muslim immigrants of an earlier era. In Search of Bengali Harlem follows Ullah from the streets of New York City to the villages of Bangladesh to uncover the pasts of his father, Habib, and mother, Mohima. Alaudin discovers that Habib was part of a rich lost history of mid-20th century Harlem, in which Bengali Muslim men, dodging racist Asian Exclusion laws, married into New York's African American and Puerto Rican communities—and in which the likes of Malcolm X and Miles Davis shared space and broke bread with immigrants from the subcontinent. He also unearths the hardships and trauma that his mother overcame to become one of the first women to immigrate to the U.S. from rural Bangladesh. In Search of Bengali Harlem is a transformative journey, not just for Alaudin Ullah, but for our understanding of the complex histories of South Asians and Muslims in the United States.
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“In Search of Bengali Harlem is remarkable in the way it tells the decades-long story of the Bengali community’s integration in Harlem, and the way Black and Brown people found each other, peeling back layer after deeply personal layer of one subject’s life. With a charismatic lead and beautiful musical accompaniment, this film provides a unique perspective of the immigrant experience and honors the singular place New York City has held throughout America’s history.”
– Juror’s Statement, DOC NYC 2022, Metropolis Competition
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About the Speaker
Vivek Bald is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, digital media producer, and scholar. His work over the past twenty-five years has explored the stories and experiences of South Asians in the U.S. and Britain. Bald’s first documentary, Taxi-vala/Autobiography (1994) examined the lives, struggles, and activism of New York City taxi drivers from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Taxi-vala premiered at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival in 1994, featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition, New Directions in Indian American Film, and was broadcast by PBS in 1996. Bald’s second film, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (2003) focused on South Asian youth, music, and anti-racist politics in 1970s-90s Britain. It premiered in New York as part of Lincoln Center’s Independents Night series. It screened at two dozen film festivals in thirteen countries, from the United Kingdom to Australia to Brazil, Norway, and the Czech Republic. In 2020, Bald consulted upon and appeared in the Peabody Award-winning PBS documentary series, Asian Americans. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the
Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013) and is the faculty director of MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, a unit devoted to the analysis and incubation of new forms of documentary: VR, AR & web-based; crowd-sourced; interactive and immersive. He is also developing “The Lost Histories Project,” an interactive documentary and participatory oral history that will build upon and extend the Bengali Harlem film and book.
The Interseminars Initiative is supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Humanities Research Institute, the Graduate College, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the College of Fine and Applied Arts, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation.