Description:

Please join the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies for our Global Lunchbox series, a weekly colloquium designed as an informal conversation.

Speaker: Nitasha Sharma is an associate professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies.

Nitasha Sharma's academic activities are based on an interdisciplinary, comparative, and ethnographic approach to the study of difference, inequality, and racism. The central goal of her teaching, research, and writing is to develop models for multiracial alliance building by zeroing in on cultural phenomena that unearth and challenge the factors that structure contentious race relations.

Dr. Sharma is co-editor of Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawai‘i (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018) and is writing her second solo-authored book, Hawai'i is my Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific with Duke University Press. This ethnography is based on a decade of fieldwork including interviews with 60 people of African descent in the islands, including Black Hawaiians, Black Japanese, and African American transplants from the continental U.S. Two questions frame this project: What does the Pacific offer people of African descent? And how does the racial lens of African Americans illuminate inequalities, including antiBlack racism, in the islands? Bringing Black Studies into conversation with Native Studies, it charts how Hawai‘i’s Black residents including Black hapas negotiate race, indigeneity, and culture. This work speaks to debates in Mixed Race Studies, Comparative Race Studies, and Diaspora Studies to analyze Blackness in the Pacific and offer new theories of belonging that emerge from the intersection of race and indigeneity.

Her first book, Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness (Duke University Press 2010), analyzes how second generation members of an upwardly mobile and middle-class immigrant group use hip hop to develop racial--and not just ethnic--identities. The racial consciousness expressed by these hip hop artists as “people of color” facilitates the development of multiracial coalitions that cross boundaries while explicitly acknowledging “difference.”

Dr. Sharma teaches courses on the following topics: Hip Hop; Asian/Black Relations in the U.S.; The Mixed Race Experience; Race, Crime, and Punishment: The Border, Prisons, and Post-9/11 Detentions; Ethnographies of Immigration, Race, and Immigration; Race and Indigeneity in the Pacific.

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Meeting ID: 935 9214 9488