Mala Pandurang (Dr BMN College, Mumbai, India) will be giving a talk entitled “Exploring the complexities of gendered and race relations in the context of African-Asian interactions: A postcolonial-ethnographic reading of the work of Sultan Somjee” in Room Visio (University of Liège, CIPL, building A4). The event will also be accessible on Zoom.

If you are interested in attending the event, please register via the following link: https://forms.gle/uusKzNeaVh2soisx7

For more information, contact Delphine Munos: delphine.munos@uliege.be.

All welcome!

Synopsis:

My talk will focus on the ethnographic-historical creative narratives of Sultan Somjee, who is a fourth generation Asian African. Somjee hails from the Ismaili Khoja community and his novels offer a rare gendered perspective into the multi-generational and transnational life histories of Ismaili Khoja women in colonial and postcolonial East Africa, while drawing attention to the complex and problematic relationship between the Asian community and indigenous African peoples. Somjee’s first novel Bead Bai (2012) attempts to reinsert into Eastern African history the forgotten life narratives of a group of Indian women known as ‘Bead Bais’ who enabled the flow of coloured beads between the ‘dukawallahs’ and the indigenous tribes that impacted the expressions of African aesthetics. In his second novel Home Between Crossings (2016), Somjee engages with the kanga (‘the cloth that speaks wisdom’) as a trope to explore the meeting of the cultures of land and oceanic migrations. In my paper, I will explore how Somjee draws from this ethnographic training to engage material artifacts in order to explore the imaginative space drawn from the colonial and postcolonial interface of feminine art, aesthetics and cultures of both settler Asian and African indigenous cultures.