Mar 22, '06 - Disappeared in America
A chat with Naeem Mohaiemen, Jaishri Abhichandani & Prerana Reddy, they are visiting Houston with their exhibit “Disappeared in America”.
www.disappearedinamerica.org
Also on Border Crossings: Music, News round up and Community Events
About our guests:
Naeem Mohaiemen is a filmmaker, writer and media activist. His documentary Muslims or Heretics looks at the role of image politics in struggles between "progressive" and "radical" Muslims, and was screened at numerous venues including the British House of Lords. His forthcoming essays include "Islamic
Hip Hop" (Sound Unbound, DJ Spooky ed., MIT Press), "Invisible Migrants" (Men of the Global South, Adam Jones ed., Zed Books) and "Where is Shiraj Shikdar" (Sarai Reader: Turbulence Issue). He is Editor of Shobak & Assoc. Editor of Alt.Muslim. Naeem works with Bangladeshi media activists, including Drishtipat and DRIK Photo. His research on ethnic cleansing of Buddhist Tribal Minorities in Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts was published in the ASK Annual Report, which is used by Amnesty International.
Naeem's work has been featured in PBS NOW, The Washington Post, Tikkun Jewish Journal, Subcontinental, Channel 4 (UK), Chimurenga
South Africa), Wordt Vervolgd (Netherlands), New Internationalist (UK), Prothom Alo (Bangladesh), Dawn (Pakistan), Rediff (India), etc.
Prerana Reddy is currently the Director of Public Events at the Queens Museum of Art, where she organizes performances, screenings, discussions, and festivals. In the Spring 2005, she co-curated "Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now" for the QMA. She has been on the organizing collective of Youth Solidarity Summer, a week-long progressive activist training for South Asian youth held in NYC every August. She is also one of the co-founders of the New York chapter of Third I, a South Asian film/video exhibition collective. For three years she sat on the board of the South Asian Women's Creative Collective and also acted as the Program Administrator for the African Film Festival for five years prior to her current position at the Queens Museum of Art. She holds a Masters in Cinema Studies from New York University and BS from Duke University.
Taken from the project’s website:
DISAPPEARED is a project by the Visible Collective/Naeem Mohaiemen that uses films, installations, & lectures to trace migration impulses, hyphenated identities and post-9/11 security panic. The majority of migrants detained in recent security hysteria were from the invisible underclass of cities like New York. They are the recent immigrants who drive our taxis, deliver our food, clean our restaurant tables, and sell fruit, coffee, and newspapers. The only time we "see" them is when we glance at the hack license in the taxi partition, or the ID card around the neck of a vendor.
The exceptions are the ultra-theatrical images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and the ocassional safe stories about "broken families." But the detained are usually men, in various states of "illegal" status, easily dismissed as "law breakers." Finally, when deported, they cease to exist in the American consciousness. This desire to create a sinister outsider with dubious "loyalty" has a long, vicious pedigree, witness the 1919 detention of 10,000 immigrants after anarchists bombed the Attorney General's home; the 1941 internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans; the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs; and the HUAC Black-listing under Senator Joseph McCarthy.
