Events
Special Events

Rivers, Forests & Earth: Speculating Dalit Histories and Dalit Futures in Bengal

Special Events
12 Apr, 2023

Rivers, Forests & Earth: Speculating Dalit Histories and Dalit Futures in Bengal

On the occasion of Dalit History Month, the Bangali Student Association (BSA), in collaboration with the Institute for South Asia Studies, the South Asian, Southwest Asian, and North African (SSWANA) Initiative, and the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley invites you to a talk by Mimi Mondal, a Hugo- and Nebula Award-nominated author of science fiction and fantasy and a columnist writing about history, politics, technology and futures.

A story set in the speculative future is essentially a projection, a line of continuity drawn from a speculative past. What does Dalit futurism in Bengal—especially in fiction—look like, when we as a community don’t really have a past? While many of us still think of ourselves as descendants of unremembered, untraceable people, whose traditions and practices are we taking into the future to keep us anchored to the core essence of being human in a world populated by aliens, super-developed AI, and other models of sapience completely distinct from humanity? I don’t have all the answers to these questions, but these are the kind of questions I ask and think about. My hope is that if enough of us ask these questions, one day we will have a common repository of imaginaries that are entirely ours, gifted from our ancestors and carried everywhere by our children far into the stars.

About the speaker

Mimi Mondal is a Hugo- and Nebula Award-nominated author of science fiction and fantasy and a columnist writing about history, politics, technology and futures. Her novelette His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light was shortlisted for the Nebula Award in 2020. Her first book, Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, co-edited with Alexandra Pierce, received the Locus Award in Non-fiction and was shortlisted for the Hugo Award in Best Related Work and the British Fantasy Award in Non-fiction, among others, in 2018. Mimi has also been the Poetry and Reprint Editor of Uncanny Magazine, a three-times-Hugo-Award-winning magazine of science fiction and fantasy, and an editor at Penguin Random House India. A full list of her recent publications can be found here.

Mimi is also a Founding/Board Member of Plurality University Network and a juror for the Crawford Award. She is the recipient of the Immigrant Artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2017; the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship for the Clarion West Writing Workshop in 2015; a Commonwealth Shared Scholarship at University of Stirling in 2013; and the Poetry with Prakriti Prize in 2010. She currently lives in New York. She tweets from @Miminality, and responds to emails sent at mondalesque@gmail.com.

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