One Century after Thind: Continuing the Conversation

Presented by the Asian American / Asian Research Institute at the City University of New York. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, the Department of Ethnic and Race Studies at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Ethnic Studies Review (University of California Press), and the Urban Studies Department at Queens College.

REGISTER

Join the Asian American / Asian Research Institute at CUNY for a panel discussion with Prachi Patankar, Mizue Aizeki, and Kirisitina Sailiata (Macalester College) on “One Century after Thind,” a new special issue of Ethnic Studies Review (University of California Press), edited by Soniya Munshi (Queens College/CUNY) and Linta Varghese (Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY), examining legacies past and present of the U.S. Supreme Court case, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923). Building on discussions in the special issue, panelists will continue examinations of caste in the South Asian diaspora, the criminalization of migrants, and the racialized citizenship debates in the early 20th century as part of U.S. state-making.

Mizue Aizeki is executive director and founder of the Surveillance Resistance Lab, a think and act tank that builds research and networks of collaboration to take on the threat of surveillance at the nexus of state and corporate power. For nearly twenty years, Mizue has focused on ending the injustices—including criminalization, imprisonment, and exile—at the intersections of the criminal and migration control systems. Mizue was a senior advisor at the Immigrant Defense Project (IDP) and the founder of the Surveillance, Tech and Immigration Project. She is a co-editor of Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (forthcoming 2023, Haymarket Books) and her photographic work appears in Dying to Live, A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books, 2008) and Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016).

Prachi Patankar is an anti-caste and feminist writer and activist who was born in rural Maharashtra, India. Over two decades in New York, she has been involved in social movements that link the local and the global, police brutality and war, migration and militarization, race and caste, women of color feminism, and global gender justice. Her work has been published by Al Jazeera, the Guardian, Jadaliyya, The Jacobin, and several other publications.

Kirisitina Sailiata is an assistant professor in American Studies at Macalester College. She earned her PhD and MA in American Studies from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and her BA in American Studies from Macalester College. Sailiata was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at the University of California-Los Angeles. She is working on a book project entitled The Making of Samoa Amelika which examines the formation of American Samoa as a territory and attending US citizenship debates in the early 20th century.

Access guidelines: This is an online event. Registration is required to attend.