Vivek Bald: "Documenting South Asian America's Interracial Past"
b'Vivek Bald, an Associate Professor in CMS/W and member of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, discusses his transmedia project documenting the lives of Bengali Muslim ship workers and silk peddlers who entered the United States at the height of the Asian Exclusion Era, between the 1890s and 1940s, and quietly settled and intermarried within African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods from Harlem to Trem\\xe9 in New Orleans and Black Bottom, Detroit.\\n\\nThe project consists of a book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (2013), a linear documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem (currently in production), and a community-sourced, web-based documentary and oral history project, \\u201cThe Lost Histories Project\\u201d (in development). Bald\\u2019s talk and demo presented a new iteration of the online project and newly edited material from the documentary.'