Join Yashica Dutt to celebrate the release of Coming Out as Dalit and mark the occasion of Amebdkar Jayanti for Dalit History Month.
Yashica Dutt is an accomplished writer, speaker, and community builder. From growing up in a formerly untouchable manual scavenging family in small town India to becoming one of the most recognized openly Dalit journalists across the world, her story is one of aspiration and achievement against all odds. Disillusioned by Indian media’s myopic coverage of Dalits and their lack of representation in newsrooms, Dutt launched "Documents of Dalit Discrimination" (https://dalitdiscrimination.tumblr.com/ )— a one of its kind safe space for Dalits to discuss their trauma with caste based discrimination and seek solidarity and support from shared experiences, which also led to her writing Coming Out as Dalit.
Coming Out as Dalit won the Sahitya Akademi Puruskar (India's National Academy of Letters' Young Author Award) in 2020, and its US edition includes reflections on caste in the Indian diaspora. Join us for what will be an insightful and historic conversation!
Yashica will be in conversation with Soumya Rachel Shailendra.
Soumya Rachel Shailendra is a PhD student in Comparative Literary Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. She holds a Mellon Cluster fellowship in Comparative Race and Diaspora Studies. Located at the intersection of Black studies and memory studies, Soumya’s research interrogates the affective structures of caste by studying the sonic and formal registers of lamentation and mourning rituals in twentieth century African American and Dalit literatures. Soumya’s project draws on the transnational and transracial solidarity between the Black power and anti-caste movements of the early 1970s to examine the “inner-life” of caste as represented in Dalit and African American writings. She is also interested in Dalit epistemologies, liberation theologies, decolonial thought, and the Black radical tradition. She is proficient in Hindi, Marathi, and Malayalam.
The event is free and open to public. Seating might be limited. RSVP to reserve your spot.
