Open Collections

Bhardwaj, Ajay

University of British Columbia

The central preoccupation of this dissertation is human mobility and how mobility in form of myriad diasporas has transformed our world. In charting diasporas, I focus on a community of progressive South Asian Canadian labour cultural activists termed as the Desi Left in British Columbia. Theoretically, I seek to interrogate Robin Cohen’s concepts of ethnoreligious diasporic community and homeland nationalism that produce a singular immigrant history. Gyanendra Pandey’s conceptual understanding of unarchived history and trifling/exile within provides the framework to write the Desi Left’s history and uncover the structural inequality of gender within it. By discussing labour cultural activism around a strand of the Desi Left- the Canadian Farmworkers Union in British Columbia (1978-1989)- I connect the early fragments of the Desi Left’s history with that of local socialists, trade union activists and the broader South Asian community. The cultural work of progressive writers and their literary societies in the 1970s and the 1980s generated a massive archive that allows me to document the history of the Desi Left. To further enrich resources for this study, I recorded extensive video interviews with labour cultural activists who crossed racial and communal boundaries in cultural solidarity work during the period. My list of cultural activists is made up of women organizers, leaders of the farmworkers’ movement, musicians, writers, visual artists, theatre activists, and filmmakers. Their cultural production— photos, posters, artwork, radio interviews, plays and videos documentaries gave a distinct cultural turn in the history of the Desi Left. The rich multimedia archive informing this dissertation has given me an opportunity to explore new methodological directions, including the production of a two-hour video documentary When the Tide Goes Out. This documentary is an integral part of this dissertation.

Text; Moving Image

2025-03-31

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/81471

Asian Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/