What Zohran Mamdani Might Have Learned From HIs Mother's Films

 What Zohran Mamdani Might Have Learned from His Mother’s Films

Amardeep Singh

Zohran Mamdani, as most readers know by now, is the son of a filmmaker, Mira Nair. His parents met while she was working on Mississippi Masala (1992); his father, Mahmood Mamdani is a professor of international affairs and anthropology who had lived through the events from the 1970s described in the film. 

Zohran was born 34 years ago (October 1991), and his mother’s film was released only a few months afterwards (in the U.S., February 1992). Obviously, one shouldn’t read the politics of one person through the lens of their parents, as some pro-Israel groups have been attempting to do. And in a New York Times interview with both parents from June, Mahmood Mamdani made it a point to differentiate his own ideas and beliefs from his son’s: “He’s his own person,” he said. Strikingly, Mira Nair immediately jumped in to express a contrary point of view: “I don’t agree… Of course the world we live in, and what we write and film and think about, is the world that Zohran has very much absorbed.” I’m curious what might happen if we take that seriously: What can we learn about Zohran’s approach to politics through his mother’s approach to filmmaking? 

Admittedly, what Mamdani has done as a politician in his brief career really has no template or precedent, though he has often cited Michelle Wu in Boston as a model for the kind of Mayor he wants to become; one can also look at the insurgent, social-media fueled candidacy of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019 as a model as well. And in recent campaign videos, we have seen Zohran appearing with other senior role models like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But despite the novelty of Zohran’s impressive political campaign, I believe there are certain core ideas about ethics and life in multicultural societies in Mira Nair’s film that circulate in Zohran’s own approach to politics. To understand where he’s coming from, I would propose readers take some time and watch these two films. 

The two films I’m going to talk about are Mississippi Masala (1992) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012). There are, of course, many other films of Nair’s I love – I wrote a whole book about her in 2018! But these are the two that seem to speak the most to the moment we’re living in, as many of us are struggling to make sense of extreme anti-immigrant policies from the Trump administration leading to widespread ICE crackdowns, families being broken up, and subtle and not so suble changes in the fabric of American society. Alongside that, many are grappling with the question of how to respond to the ongoing horror and tragedy in Gaza, including the Hamas attack of October 7 as well as the two years of vast killing and destruction by the Israeli army, funded and supported by the American military under both Biden and Trump. 

Mississippi Masala

Mississippi Masala a film featuring a romance between an Indian woman whose parents were forced out of Uganda during the Asian Expulsion in 1971, and an African American man. It was the first film of Nair’s that I myself saw, and I remember being entranced by what I was seeing on screen. Both leads were people of color (highly unusual in a Hollywood studio-financed film in the early 1990s), and Indian communities in the U.S. were being shown on screen as something other than convenience store clerks. 

In my book chapter on Mississippi Masala (I posted an excerpt of it online here a few weeks ago), I was struck by the similarity between the narrative of Nair’s film and some of the stories in Mahmood Mamdani’s published memoir of the Ugandan Asian Expulsion, From Citizen to Refugee. Mamdani’s book and Nair’s film both show how a culturally and racially mixed society can become internally polarized. As the deadline to the expulsion approaches, friendships between Indian and African Ugandans become strained under the pressure of the dictator Idi Amin’s plan to force all people of Indian descent to leave the country. At one point early in the film, Jay and Okelo are discussing Jay’s decision to talk to the BBC and publicly criticize Idi Amin: 

Okelo: Don’t talk to me about cowards. That’s what you are. You’re not leaving because you’re scared to leave? You are scared of leaving Uganda.”

Jay: “Why should I go? Why should I go? Okelo, this is my home.”

Okelo: “Not any more, Jay. Africa is for Africans. Black Africans.”

At the moment, this rejection from Okelo is hurtful – it seems as if his friend (who is a Black Ugandan) has picked up the chauvinism of the country’s leader. But later, we come to understand that this was a subtle way for Okelo to pressure his friend to do the safe thing, and get his family out of the country before it was too late. 

Later, Jay and his family are living in Mississippi, where they are in close social and cultural proximity to the state’s African American community. There is a risk, here, of internalizing the anti-Blackness of the U.S. South as well as the sense of grievance coming from past experiences to color their attitudes towards the Black folks they encounter. Jay learns over the course of the film to let go of the old and embrace the new – and that includes coming to accept his daughter’s decision to be with an African American man as her romantic partner. 

For Mamdani’s politics, the lessons of Mississippi Masala might be: 

1) We should double down on embracing immigrant cultures and communities even if the Great Leader says otherwise. Immigrants to the U.S. come from many different backgrounds. Some are fleeing from violent situations or unsustainable poverty. Their stories and cultures are valuable and worth sharing. Mamdani himself is part of that story, but so are millions of other New Yorkers. We have to be on guard against attempts from our country’s leaders – and I am thinking of both Idi Amin and Donald Trump – to divide us against each other, or to allow the violent exclusion of migrants to become the norm. 

2) Relationships between different ethnic and racial communities can still be tricky. One mistake of both anti-immigrant groups and some progressive activists is to think that all “people of color” are essentially aligned together. It’s not true. Latinos who identify, racially, as White are increasingly drifting towards the Republican party and Trump. And within big cities like New York and Philadelphia, there can be deep tensions within and between minoritized communities, and these need to be understood and addressed. And finally, the beliefs and values of other minoritized community can change over time. Mississippi Masala is about the tensions that can divide us – including between minoritized communities – but also about the path to healing. 

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a loose adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel. Hamid’s novel is a relatively tight and narrow story about a young Pakistani who moved to the U.S. in search of the American dream, and rose through the corporate ladder – only to become disillusioned after 9/11 and the advent of the War on Terror. He returns home to Pakistan, and has a tense encounter with a shadowy American intelligence officer who may be there to assassinate him or take him into custody. Nair’s adaptation expands its scope and makes the action plot of the novel much more dramatic. It admittedly doesn’t all hang together perfectly well, and when the film was released in the U.S. in 2012 reviewers found it to be a bit uneven. In my view, it’s still worth watching, especially as we think about the moment we are in now – two years into a bloody, senseless war in Gaza and a fragile ceasefire. 

While the anti-immigrant ideologues in the Trump administration like Stephen Miller, seem adverse to any immigration from non-European countries, Nair’s film and Hamid’s novel remind us that the vast majority of immigrants to the U.S., including from Muslim countries, come here as admirers of core American values like individualism, economic opportunity, and multicultural acceptance. As Changez says repeatedly in the film, “I am a lover of America.” He graduates from Princeton; he gets a job at a top multinational financial firm in New York; he meets and falls in love with Erica, a young artist. 

For Changez, a confluence of professional and personal crises lead him to give it all up, and returning to Pakistan. The professional crisis is a sense of confusion over the purpose of his activities: increasingly, it seems the work of U.S.-based globalization and transnational finance is a proxy for a kind of global dominance that Changez no longer believes in: “I was a soldier in your economic army.” And culturally, Changez comes to understand the point of view of communities resistant to American military and political dominance as well, as we see in the growing gap between Changez’s character (played by Riz Ahmed) and the film’s Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schrieber). 

Just as it was a challenge for Nair to show an interracial romance between two people of color in a mainstream film in Mississippi Masala, it was tough going to make a mainstream film with a Muslim protagonist who comes to sharply criticize the American War on Terror. (In the end, the bulk of the film’s financing came from an organization in Qatar (the Doha Film Institute).

All of this is relevant at the present moment, as more and more Americans have come to reexamine their assumptions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Zohran’s most frequently challenged position – one that would have been unthinkable for a mainstream politician in New York in the years following 9/11 – is his sharp criticism of the Israeli government. Just a couple of weeks ago, the New York Times did a helpful profile of his background and experience on this topic, leading back to his undergraduate activism with Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin College. 

One important lesson from Nair’s film – and one that’s hard to swallow for many liberal Americans – is that the U.S. role in other parts of the world has not always been constructive or helpful. Indeed, many of its policies, economic and military, have led to growing grievances from large numbers of people elsewhere, including in the Arab world. In the case of Gaza, a large percentage of the bombs that have, in effect, leveled the territory and caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths were supplied directly by the U.S. government – American taxpayers. 

Nair’s film helps us understand how received and mainstream political views in the U.S. can seem so far afield from how the rest of the world might see and experience things. In the U.S., the “two-state” solution has been the mainstream goal for a lasting peace for several decades, but Zohran Mamdani, echoing the arguments from activist groups such as SJP and the JVP, along with activists in other parts of the world, have come to see that end as unlikely – and perhaps as a distraction from what they view as the only real solution – a multiethnic, pluri-religious democracy consisting of Jews and Arabs together. 

Nair’s film does not specifically address Israel-Palestine, but it helps us understand where someone like Zohran Mamdani might be coming from on this issue. The film makes a subtle case that it’s not just explicit military and intelligence agencies that are responsible; the financial system and other facets of economic and cultural mainstream are also a part of it (“I was a soldier in your economic army”). Who are the good guys in this story? Whose voices can mainstream film-goers in North America or Europe actually hear? 

Zohran’s politics on Israel and Palestine probably shouldn’t matter as much as they do; as mayor of New York, he will have little power to affect U.S. foreign policy. But the truth is, they do matter, and they signify a change of attitude especially among younger people and within minoritized communities that Democratic leaders would be foolish to ignore.  If Zohran Mamdani is a harbinger of generational change in American politics, one of the most significant changes he may usher in is a dramatic realignment of the U.S. orientation to Israel. 

Modernist Studies Association Conference 2025: A Few Notes and Highlights

I was recently at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Boston.

MSA 2025 felt busy and lively, with many panels I wanted to see and workshops I wished I could have joined. My own main presentation at the conference was a talk on Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and the making of Fire!!; I posted the slides publicly here. I also did a short position paper related to African American literature beyond Harlem for a workshop organized by Adam McKible; most of my claims came out of my datasets at African American Poetry: a Digital Anthology, which can be found here.

Below, I'll just give brief accounts of some things I saw and enjoyed, without saying too much about the actual findings of the research by the scholars who gave the talks. I won't try to cover everything I saw, in part because it would lead to a post that would be really, really long. I'm also trying to be sensitive to the research as presented -- much of which is not yet published. (So instead of saying what speaker X said, I'll say, they were looking at this text.)

Remembering Sejal Sutaria:

To start, the emotional heart of the conference for me was the panel "Writing in Community: Thinking Alongside Sejal Sutaria in Memoriam." As some readers may know, the scholar Sejal Sutaria recently passed away, and three of her close friends in academia (Ria Bannerjee, Casey Andrews, and J. Ashley Foster) organized a panel to commemorate her and discuss aspects of her published and unpublished work. I won't say too much about the specific papers given by the speakers, because I don't have direct permission to do so. I will say, however, that I was really moved by the way they blended personal reminiscences and tributes with academic engagement. Though we weren't close, I had known Sejal for many years (our first email correspondence was back in 2006, though I believe we first met in person at MSA around 2010 or 2011. We were on a panel together at the Woolf conference in 2019, and were scheduled to be on a panel together for last year's MSA, though she ultimately had to drop out for health reasons.). Sejal was a lovely person and a thoughtful scholar; she will be missed. You can find one of her published scholarly articles on Venu Chitale here; she covers some of the same ground in this essay at the BBC website. 

Also, Daniel Morse was in the audience, and he mentioned that Sejal had given a talk at his invitation at the University of Nevada-Reno four years ago, again on Venu Chitale's BBC work during World War II. The YouTube link for the talk is here.

Conventional academic panels -- a few links and highlights

The Baroness:

Eliza Browning, a Ph.D. student at Princeton, had a thought-provoking presentation on the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, an extremely idiosyncratic modernist figure sometimes overlooked by scholars as a Dadaist provocateur and not much else. A migrant from Germany to the U.S., she published quite a lot in The Little Review up through 1925, at which point the editors of that storied little magazine started rejecting her writings. Subsequently, her poems were often edited by her romantic partner Djuna Barnes, who held onto her manuscripts throughout the remainder of her own long life, trying but failing to find a publisher who would print them. Scholars today have the benefit of finally having the Baroness' writings collected in print, in a volume called Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

Natalie Barney: a "social modernist"

I also saw Sophie Yates, a Ph.D. student at UBC in Vancouver speaking about Natalie Barney, a rich American woman who lived as an expatriate in France for most of her adult life, and self-published a number of books of poetry and prose that circulated amongst a fairly small coterie. She was well-known to many other expatriates in France, including Sylvia Beach (who did not think highly of Barney's writing), and she was well known for taking many female lovers, including a British poet (who wrote in French!) named Renee Vivien. I won't say too much about Yates' readings of Barney, except to say that the works sound interesting, especially in connection with a close account of Barney's personal life.  

Anticolonial Manifestos:

I also went to a panel on "The Manifesto and Anticolonial Thought." Here I was most interested in new work from Peter Kalliney, on three mid-century transnational conferences for Black writers, the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists (in Paris), the 1958 Afro-Asian Writers Conference that was held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1958, and the African Writers Conference that was held at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, in June 1962. Kalliney was interested in the manifesto-like resolutions produced at each of these events. He cited James Baldwin's first-hand account of the third event, published in an essay called "Princes and Powers." 

On the same panel, Alys Moody spoke about Aime Cesaire's often-overlooked poem, "Pour un greviste assassine" (For an assassinated striker), which you can find excerpted on JSTOR here. The poem is different from other Cesaire poetry I've read, in part because it's so direct and not especially 'surreal'. 

Also on the same panel, Maru Pabon of Brown University spoke about the Francophone Algerian poet Jean Senac, who worked closely with militants against French colonialism, but who was assassinated, possibly by Islamist militants, in 1973. Senac seems like a fascinating and important figure; I was particularly intrigued by Senac's "Ode to Afro-America" (1972). 

Queer and Trans Topics:

I saw part of a nice paper by Kristin Mahoney of Michigan State University on the fraught relationship

between the theosophist Jiddu Krishnamurti and his mentor (really: groomer) Charles Leadbeater. Krishnamurti was brought into the Theosophical Society by Leadbeater, and declared the "world teacher," but later rebelled against it. 

Chris Coffman of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks gave a paper on "Nonbinary Gender and Desire" in H.D. and Byrher. They were looking at H.D.'s "I Said" and Bryher's early collection of poetry, "Arrow Music." I found the readings of nonbinary or genderfluid frameworks of desire particularly compelling around this collection of poetry by Bryher. Bryher's 1922 collection isn't available online at all at present! Earlier, according to the U-Penn online books page, it was available at the Emory Women Writers Resource Project; now that points to a page on the Wayback Machine. One poem from the collection, "The Pool," can be found here.

At the same panel, I saw Mat Fournier of Ithaca College presenting on a fascinating trans-masc. figure named Violette Morris. Morris was a famous athlete in the 1910s who began to dress in male clothes and later had a mastectomy. She/They also got into car racing and later collaborated with the Fascist Vichy Regime. Fournier was interested in the question of whether and how Morris' strong desire to pass might have led them to embrace the most conservative mold of masculinity available at the time, which in turn led to a sympathy for fascist politics. 

Queer and Trans Marianne Moore

I also attended a panel on "Queer and Trans Modernist Poetics," which two speakers, Celine Shanosky
of Harvard and Benjamin Kahan of Louisiana State University, both speaking about trans and asexual tendencies in Marianne Moore's poetry. Kahan, of course, has a chapter on Moore in his book Celibacies, and Shanosky, a graduate student was citing that in her paper. Kahan here was perhaps slightly revising (or expanding) his earlier work on Moore, with a focus on Moore's own penchant for identifying with masculine figures in fiction as well as her famous public outfit (the tricolor hat and cape). Kahan here was focusing mostly on Moore's most autobiographical final book, Tell Me Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics (1966).  

Little Magazines in Kolkata:

I also went to a South Asian Modernism panel (one of a handful at the conference), with speakers all focused on the College Street Neighborhood in Kolkata (Calcutta). This is an area just across from several major colleges established during the colonial period, including Hindu College, Presidency College, and the University of Calcutta. Since the early 20th century, it's been a place where you can find bookseller stalls lining the street, and coffeehouses where students congregate. A graduate student at Stanford, Suchismito Khatua, spoke about the Kolkata Little Magazine Library and Research Centre, founded by Sandip Dutta in 1978.  Dutta runs this center out of his family's house on Tamer Lane (just off College Street. He had the idea for it when he saw the librarians at the National Library throwing out a bag of old little magazines in the mid-1970s. Thus, an archive was born. 

It seems like a really cool place, though the pictures Suchismito shared of stacks upon stacks of magazines not arranged in any appreciable order struck me as both exciting and exhausting. What's in those stacks? Who in their right mind would catalog all of it? 

Keynote: Evie Shockley and Kevin Quashie talking about Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucile Clifton, Auden... 

I was only able to get to one keynote event, with Evie Shockley and Kevin Quashie talking about poetry in a structured conversation (not a conventional 'talk'). They talked about Gwendolyn Broooks' "Boy Breaking Glass," Lucille Clifton's "Study the Masters," Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts," as well as several poems by Shockley herself that seem to be in dialogue with some of these earlier poems. 

Throughout, they were interested in how these poets deal with questions of minoritization, the legacy of race and racism, and the social function of poetry. 

Along the way, they mentioned Shockley's concept of the Son-not -- a poem that looks like a sonnet, perhaps, but subtly isn't one. There's a bit more about that here.

See my notes from MSA 2024 here.

Slides for MSA 2025: Wallace Thurman and Bruce Nugent

Two Conferences: Toni Morrison (Cornell) and Frances E.W. Harper (Penn State)

I attended two conferences this past weekend, the Toni Morrison conference at Cornell, celebrating 70 years of Morrison's graduating with her M.A. from the institution, and the Frances E.W.  Harper conference at Penn State, celebrating the 200th birthday of the great Pennsylvania-based writer-activist. 

1. From the Morrison conference, a highlight for me was giving a talk on Toni Morrison (based on my recent article) in the new Toni Morrison Hall on North Campus. I was an undergraduate student at Cornell 1992-1995 and it felt a little surreal to be back. Much is different (the beautiful design of Klarman Hall, grafted onto Goldwin Smith; the new Toni Morrison and Ruth Bader Ginsburg halls), but quite a number of the core buildings on campus are still the same. The A.D. White House, for instance... Collegetown Bagels... 

From the conference itself, a few highlights include: 

• The screening of a documentary about Morrison's month-long residency at the Louvre in Paris in 2006, "The Foreigner's Home"
• Farah Jasmine Griffin's powerful and graceful keynote address (which got a standing ovation from the audience!). Since seeing the keynote I've been reading more of Griffin's work; I'm three chapters into her 2021 book Read Until You Understand; highly recommend. 
• Autumn Womack's keynote about the construction of the Toni Morrison "Sites of Memory" exhibit at Princeton (spring 2023). I saw this exhibit in person when it was up, and enjoyed the chance to learn more about how it was put together.  
• Kevin Young's poetry reading Friday evening. I mostly knew Kevin Young as an editor before this conference; now I'm eager to pick up his books of poetry and explore them. 
• I had a spirited exchange with a French scholar who was interested in aligning Morrison's Playing in the Dark with Derrida's later writings on race. It seemed like she wanted to align Derrida and Morrison in a way that seemed a little confused; I tried to challenge her to also note the real divergences between them.  In my mind, it seems important to think about why we want to link certain authors to concepts in French theory. I do do some of this in my own work, but I try and do it very carefully and for the right reasons. Does X theory concept help us understand Toni Morrison? If not, why are we invested in using it / invoking it? 
• My own paper was pretty well received. It was an extract from my recent published article on Morrison. 
• Seeing a number of my former professors from the 1990s around, including some who are retired, but at least one who is not. I also enjoyed meeting legendary people I had not met when I was at Cornell as a student, such as Dr. Margaret Washington. We talked about the impact of the tradition of student protest at Cornell, including the 1968 takeover of Willard Straight Hall by the Black Student Union and the 1995 takeover of Day Hall by Latino students.  I also got the chance to meet Carol Boyce Davies, who had been at Cornell for many years, but who now teaches at Howard University. 

2. The Harper conference at Penn State was beautifully organized and implemented by a pretty impressive group of faculty and staff.  After giving my paper at Cornell Saturday morning, I drove down to State College for this second event. 

I missed some of the opening panels (since I was at Cornell). But here the highlight for me was definitely the dinner honoring Frances Smith Foster, a pioneering scholar who helped put Frances Harper on the map. I got a chance the next day to chat with Dr. Foster directly for awhile and she was wonderful -- sharp as ever, and very generous and wise.

This conference was a little challenging for me in part because it's in a period (pre-1900 American literature) that is outside my traditional areas of competence. (I got interested in Harper through my Digital Anthology project.)  But the enthusiasm and commitment to Harper was very palpable and contagious. There are very few authors who inspire this type of deep moral and intellectual commitment (Toni Morrison, interestingly enough, is another such writer). If I do another Harper event, I'll certainly want to spend some time deepening my knowledge and filling in some of the gaps in what I've read. 

One of the exciting new developments in Harper studies was Eric Gardner's recent discovery of a previously unknown speech by Harper, "National Salvation."  I'm also very much looking forward to his upcoming book on Harper from Oxford.

It's possible that the paper I wrote for the conference might be published in a collection in the near future (we'll see). My own paper, looking at the pessimistic strain in Harper's poetry, was somewhat controversial, though I enjoyed the challenge of writing it and participating in the discussion.  

Overall, this second conference was both inspiring and humbling. 

New Project: Adivasi Writers: An Introduction to India's Indigenous Literature

This summer, I've been working with a graduate student collaborator, Srishti Raj, on a new digital project, called Adivasi Writers: An Introduction to India's Indigenous Literature. 

Here's the project summary: 

This site aims to be an educational resource for Adivasi writing, helping to share South Asia's indigenous literature with the broader world. For those who are unfamiliar, Adivasis are South Asian indigenous communities, subject to a long history of marginalization and displacement going back to the colonial era and continuing in the present. There are more than 100 million Adivasi people in India alone, located throughout the country, with particular concentrations in central India as well as in the northeast region. For generations, Adivasis were written about rather than subjects of their own story. This site aims to help change that by centering Adivasi voices directly in a decolonial framework, and making their writings accessible to a broad readership.

I got interested in this project in part through engaging with decolonial theory focused primarily on Latin America and indigenous literatures of the Americas. Shouldn't we be talking about these ideas in South Asia as well? Unfortunately, despite many years of teaching and writing about Anglophone South Asian literature, my own knowledge on the topic of indigenous communities in South Asia was limited to people writing about Adivasis, not writing by people from those communities themselves. And my hunch was that this would likely be true for most of my peers as well: not many papers on Adivasi literature are given at conferences like the South Asian Literature Association (SALA) conference, and I don't see too many in U.S.-based journals either. (Journals published in India, like the Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature, do a little better.) 

Overall, this seemed like another gap in the archive -- perhaps something that could be addressed if one were willing to do some digging!

As I first conceived of this project in 2023, my basic knowledge of those Adivasi communities was itself pretty thin. I knew about Santhals and the Ho community from reading Mahashweta Devi's work, but little about the others (and there are hundreds of officially recognized Scheduled Tribes in India, with a population of more than 100 million people!). An early experiment entailed looking for maps of Adivasi communities. I wrote about my results with that research in 2023 here. 

In short, our summer research process followed three stages. 

1. First, we quickly learned we had to be looking beyond English-language materials. By default, this summer, we have been looking at a fair amount of materials in Hindi. 
2. We did discover a number of helpful resources online to help us with our research. 
3. We have been experimentally trying to translate some key materials we've been encountering, often using generative AI translation engines. 

Mira Nair, Mahmood Mamdani, and "Mississippi Masala" (book chapter excerpt)

In honor of Zohran Mamdani's victory in the NYC mayoral primary, I'm posting the following chapter excerpt is from my 2018 book on Mira Nair, called The Films of Mira Nair: Diaspora Verite, In the chapter, I track the parallels between Nair's Mississippi Masala (1993) and Mahmood Mamdani's memoir of the Ugandan expulsion, From Citizen to Refugee (1972).

The parallels between Mamdani's real-life experiences and the fictional account in the film, I argue, are pretty strong, and a look at the Mamdani text helps unpack the complexity of the Indian community's presence in Uganda that are shown in highly compressed form in the film. In the second half of the excerpt below, I discuss how Nair explores the complexity of race relations in the U.S., especially with newer immigrants complicating the white/Black binary of the American race formation.

Slides for The Space Between Conference: "African American Poetry of World War I"

 I'm giving a talk at The Space Between conference at KU in Lawrence, Kansas this week. The talk is built around a section of "African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology" that I've found to be of particular interest -- African American Poetry of World War I. 

Slides for ALA Conference 2025: The Boston Branch of the Harlem Renaissance

I'm giving a talk at this year's American Literature Association Conference in Boston, for a panel celebrating "100 Years of the Harlem Renaissance." I'll be talking about the Saturday Evening Quill, a magazine published in -- appropriately! -- Boston, from 1928-1930. 

Teaching Notes: "The God of Small Things" General Overview and Context

Briefly Introducing Arundhati Roy and The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy is one of the most successful Indian writers in English of all time. Her first novel, The God of Small Things, was a bestseller around the English-speaking world upon its release in 1997, leading Roy to win the prestigious Booker Prize in 1998.

However, Roy took a long break from writing fiction after The God of Small Things, and became known as an activist and political essayist, who frequently wrote to criticize undemocratic policies of the Indian government as well as the American prosecution of the “War on Terror” after 9/11. She’s also well-known for her interventions on behalf of environmental justice (especially for Indian indigenous communities, known as adivasis or "tribals") as well as her advocacy for Dalits and other low-caste communities. Many of these themes are visible in one way or another in The God of Small Things; the issue of caste is obvious; there is also an important environmental justice theme if you read carefully. 

Roy finally published her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, in 2017. It’s a fascinating book in many ways, with a transgender protagonist (pretty unusual in Indian fiction) and a plot involving the Indian government’s response to the Kashmiri secessionist movement. It’s closely attentive to important events in recent Indian politics. If you like The God of Small Things, you might enjoy that newer novel as well, though on the whole the newer book is a little messier and less well-structured than this one (some reviewers complained that Roy needed a stronger editor…).  

With her playful use of language, Roy is often compared to writers from an earlier period in Indian writing, especially Salman Rushdie. Writers like Rushdie delight in wordplay and puns, especially puns or jokes that come from Indian languages; Rushdie also employed a “magic realist” method – certain supernatural plot events are built into his novels, alongside conventional, realist narratives involving realistic human characters. Roy doesn’t have ‘magic’ in that way, but there is nevertheless a sense in her fiction that everyday life is supersaturated with meaning and significance. 

Syllabus: Digital Humanities Grad Course, Spring 2025

I taught a DH class with twelve graduate students this spring. It was my first time teaching DH since fall 2020, and a lot has changed in the field since then. My own approach has become much more hands-on, with a lot less by way of "what is DH?" theorizing. I also added new units on mapping and Storymaps/ArcGIS, a crash course introducing Python, and a couple of sessions to discuss the implications of generative AI. 

It may be a bit tedious to navigate, but I opted to include the 'long-form' syllabus below the jump, with lots of links to individual projects and articles alongside descriptions of some of the hands-on exercises we did in this course.    

Syllabus 

English 498: Introduction to Digital Humanities 

Spring 2025

Professor: Amardeep Singh (“Deep”)

Email: amsp@lehigh.edu 

Brief Description: 

This course introduces students to the emerging field of digital humanities scholarship with an emphasis on social justice-oriented projects and practices. The course will begin with a pair of foundational units that aim to define digital humanities as a field, and also to frame what’s at stake. How might the advent of digital humanities methods impact how we read and interpret literary texts? How is technology reshaping the role of the Humanities in our cultural conversations more broadly? We’ll also explore a series of thematic clusters, including “Race and the Digital Humanities,” “Postcolonial/Decolonial DH,” “Archives, Editions, and Collections,” and “Texts as Data.” Along the way, we’ll explore specific Digital Humanities projects that exemplify those areas, and play and learn with digital tools and do some basic coding using Python. The final weeks of the course will be devoted to collaborative, student-driven projects. No prior programming or web development experience is necessary, but a willingness to experiment and ‘break things’ is essential to the learning process envisioned in this course.

The final project may be a conventional analytical paper or a digital project – either a custom-built corpus (with brief explanatory essay), a custom-built mapping project (perhaps using ArcGIS), or a Scalar collection, or something else that you would like to produce. If you do a digital project, I would strongly recommend consulting with me early and scoping out the resources you might need to make it a reality. The work should be “equivalent” to the amount of time you might spend on a 15 page paper. 

Humanities AI in 2025: Brief Reflections After a Conference

I’ll try and keep these reflections brief. There were maybe three threads I was following at the recent Humanities AI conference at Lehigh:

1) Critical AI

Slide from Greg Reihman

2) Academic Power Users. ("Generative AI is pretty useful for scholarship; here’s what I’m doing with it.")

3) Critically-engaged Best Practices. ("Yes, let's be critical of commercial generative AI, but insofar as scholars are going to use it in academic work, here are some best practices.")

Often it seems like group #1 and group #2 are engaged in non-intersecting conversations. People invested in critical AI have been hardening their position against the "plagiarism machine" in recent months, especially as we've seen it operating in the destructive DOGE cuts to the federal government. It is important to engage with those critiques -- though it might also be good to pay attention to the ways generative AI has been changing, and also alternative approaches to engaging with it. 

I'm not sure it actually happened at the conference, but if we bring the observations of critics together with the experience and knowledge base of regular practitioners, we might get to #3.

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1) “Critical AI” is a phrase (and now a journal) associated with different lines of thought highlighting the many problems with the overhyped generative AI industry, with a long list of valid complaints, focusing on a broad array of topics:

• Its domination by big tech companies jockeying for position and market position
• Its status as business marketing ploy (“AI-powered coffee machine!” → No one needs this.)
• The implicit biases contained within AI training data, and the crude fixes we’ve seen for those biases (see Meredith Broussard, Joy Buolamwini, Lauren Goodlad, etc.)
• Its potential to be used for broad social surveillance and algorithmically-assisted policy harms, often sloppily deployed (i.e., DOGE cuts)
• The problem of not knowing what exactly is in that training data (including copyrighted texts). (Bigger issue: lack of transparency of closed platforms.)
• The concern that our experience of it as a “magic black box” continues to lead people to react to it as both a miraculous thing (harbinger of “AGI”) and as catastrophic (AGI doomerism).
• The magic black box is also of course a huge problem for teachers dealing with students who abuse the technology: it’s too easy to get answers and ‘good enough’ paper drafts. Generative AI as a way to avoid cognitive labor & the real and valuable struggle of trying to write.
• Environmental costs – exorbitant water and power demands, often invisible to the average user
• Its tendency to hallucinate – to create bad and made-up data, invent sources that don’t exist, and engage in faulty reasoning. (Gen AI as a linguistic statistical modeling machine…)
• The danger of it intensifying the epidemic of social isolation, loneliness, and epistemic insularity that has already been underway since the advent of the smartphone. People are increasingly turning to generative AI for companionship and therapy. Some of those uses could be benign (maybe a few trial runs with an AI therapist could lead humans to realize they might benefit from seeking out a real, human therapist). But the companionship use-cases have a lot of depressing possible outcomes, including a growing risk of personal dependency on the machine.  One hears anecdotally about young people turning to AI in lieu of human romantic partners, or marriages breaking up, etc.

My favorite moment along the lines of Critical AI conversation at the conference came from my colleague, Greg Reihman, who said, “What if, instead of calling the technology we are talking about ‘Generative AI,’ we had called it “Computational Text Generation Devices?”

My initial thought to that rhetorical question was, “if we called it that, probably none of us would be here in this room...” Which is to say, if it weren’t generally referred to as “AI” -- with all the science fiction baggage and mythos associated with that term -- probably the topic would be of interest to a narrow slice of computational linguists and natural language processing people in Computer Science. We wouldn’t have a room full of academics in fields like Religion, Philosophy, History, Asian Studies, Art & Design, and English all talking about it. Our collective investment in this topic is a result of marketing, of hype, of mainstream awareness.

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2) AI Power Users. 

Alongside several papers expressing some version of the above points, there were papers from people who use generative AI on a regular basis to do their academic research.

This conference had a substantial representation of Asian Studies scholars; some of those scholars were using it for translation and historical research: recent gen AI models have apparently made significant advances on translating from Chinese. Others were using it to query and engage in highly specialized topical research. I won't say too much about specific research, though you can get a sense of how that was talked about from the titles and backgrounds of the presenters on the program.

My friends and collaborators Anna Preus and Melanie Walsh have been using it to classify poetry, with some interesting results. See their published article on this here. 

There was also a paper on “Vibe Coding” that walked through how people, both in the industry and academia, are using gen AI to bypass traditional software development and coding. This can work on a limited scale, but it comes with a lot of problems, especially if you’re building software that might need to be updated, maintained, or used by lots of people. 

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3) Best Practices & A Couple of Useful Tools

Could we synthesize the critiques from group #1 with the observations made by people in group #2? If we are going to use generative AI for scholarly research, there might be a set of best practices we might want to employ.

A) Open Access. There seems to be a consensus that we should turn to open-access models instead of commercial generative AI like ChatGPT. For academic research, look for models with specialized / tailored training data (like the "Historical Perspectives Language Model", which could be used to study how language and usage have changed over time). 

One big reason for this is that we don’t want to be subject to the whims and vagaries of whatever Sam Altman is Tweeting about today. We also don't want to be 'locked in' as consumers willing to pay whatever price OpenAI wants to charge ($200 a month???). This might address the big business / tech billionaire complaint to some extent. (Not entirely: Llama is an open-access model, but it is of course created by Meta with the long-term goal of helping the company make money.)

Another possible value of open models is that we can know much more about what's in those models and how they work.  This might address the lack of transparency complaint. 

But another good reason to do this is actually about our own costs – open access models running offline are, as I understand it, free so we could feel empowered to try queries that might otherwise use too many ‘tokens’.  

B) Generative AI is constantly changing. It would probably be best if we stopped making very generalized claims along the lines of “AI simply can’t do that.” 

One feature of many papers I saw is an acute awareness that the platforms are constantly evolving and changing. The weird outputs of generative AI images from DALL-E a couple of years ago are mostly gone, as my colleague Jenny Kowalski talked about in her presentation. In their place are pretty generic, very average and acceptable images.

Some platforms still have trouble doing text with images, but others now do that very well (the latest ChatGPT).

Also, generative AI platforms also couldn’t do math very well a couple of years ago. Now they are much better at it (still not perfect). 

Overall, the commercial platforms are very aware that their long-term usefulness to a large swath of users – along with their commercial viability – will be greater if they can do a variety of tasks reasonably well, some of which might involve text generation, while others will involve reasoning and data analysis. So, especially since DeepSeek emerged a few months ago, they appear to have been making investments in building up those things rather than simply getting larger and larger datasets.

One task for scholars in the short term might be to try and keep track of what generative AI platforms are doing and how they’re changing. (Ideally, it would be great if the platforms themselves would document all the changes they’re making with each version in plain English. But if they’re not doing that, maybe we should be doing it.)

C) There are tools that can help us look inside training data used by models.

One is called “What’s in My Big Data?” This looks inside the pre-training data of DOLMA, an open-access AI model created by AllenAI. You can query specific pieces: is this particular novel in the training data? Instead of speculating or relying on the libgen catalog, WIMBD allows you to get under the hood of the generative AI models (and we can assume that what’s in DOLMA is probably at least somewhat similar to what might be in other models)

Unfortunately, WIMBD in its current form will be shutting down soon due to the costs of running it.

Another cool tool people were talking about is OLLAMA. OLLAMA allows you to run various gen AI models on the command line on your own machine. You can also configure them to develop answers to queries based specifically on libraries you might have on your own hard drive.

This way, your use of GenAI remains “offline” – the companies aren’t taking your data, and you can explore queries that might be closely related to your main research area. 

Needless to say, if you're running one of these models locally, you don't have to pay for a subscription -- it's free. 

If we approach generative AI in these ways, we might be able to avoid some of the worst pitfalls of the commercial generative AI industry. We might also hopefully stop seeing it as a magic black box and start seeing it as a research tool to facilitate certain limited tasks, not to replace human expertise, but to supplement it.