Subhalakshmi Gooptu will work on the book proposal for her manuscript and complete her public writing project “Andolan in the Archives,” which traces narratives of South Asian American labor movements, organizations, and community building. The latter began as a project during her time as Visiting Scholar at the Institute in 2024-25, when she also completed an article which examined the use of textiles, fabrics, cloth and dressing in multimedia exhibits by Indo-Caribbean visual artists in New York City. 

Subhalakshmi Gooptu is assistant professor of World Literature at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY. She specializes in postcolonial literature, culture and theory, Asian diasporic studies, and histories of labor migrations across the Indian and Atlantic oceans. She is currently developing her manuscript “Archives of Reproduction,” which studies the figure of the coolie woman in British Caribbean plantations through visual, literary, and archival representations of Asian indentured labor.