INDIANS ON INDIAN LANDS - Nishant Upadhyay (with guests!)

Join us for a book talk with Nishant Upadhyay, author of INDIANS ON INDIAN LANDS. With Sanober Umar and Pamila Matharu. Moderated by Nadia Hasan, Assistant Professor, York University

Cosponsored by Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, School of Gender, Women and Sexuality studies, Centre for Indigenous Knowledges and Languages, Centre for Feminist Research, Department of Social and Political Thought at York University

ABOUT THE BOOK

Nishant Upadhyay unravels Indian diasporic complicity in its ongoing colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples, lands, and nations in Canada. Upadhyay examines the interwoven and simultaneous areas of dominant Indian caste complicity in processes of settler colonialism, antiblackness, capitalism, brahminical supremacy, Hindu nationalism, and heteropatriarchy. Resource extraction in British Columbia in the 1970s through the 1990s and in present-day Alberta offers examples of spaces that illuminate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and simultaneously reveals racialized, gendered, and casted labor formations. Upadhyay juxtaposes these extraction sites with examples of anticolonial activism and solidarities from Tkaronto. Analyzing silence on settler colonialism and brahminical caste supremacy, Upadhyay upends the idea of dominant caste Indian diasporas as racially victimized and shows that claiming victimhood denies a very real complicity in enforcing other power structures. Exploring stories of quotidian proximity and intimacy between Indigenous and South Asian communities, Upadhyay offers meditations on anticolonial and anti-casteist ways of knowledge production, ethical relationalities, and solidarities.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Another Story Bookshop, 315 Roncesvalles Avenue, Toronto, Canada