AsPr Shameem Black

I integrate critical and creative approaches within literary, gender and cultural studies to shed light on the ethics and politics of cross-cultural encounters. My work largely focuses on the everyday power of culture within India and its diaspora in the twenty-first century. I am a co-editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and a co-convener of the MemoryHub@ANU. My current work explores creative research methods and forms. I ask how culturally diverse practices, such as yoga, can generate fresh modes of inquiry within academic life. 

My most recent book, Flexible India: Yoga's Cultural and Political Tensions (Columbia University Press, 2024), takes the popular practice of yoga as a lens to understand competing ideas of Indianness in the world. Tracking the imaginative life of yoga, I analyse how such cultural practices create new meanings for Indianness in the context of international migration, expanding capitalisms, histories of violence, and aspirations for cross-cultural engagement. These practices reveal the workings of everyday power.

This research builds on my first book in literary studies, Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels (Columbia University Press, 2010). In this book, I explore how novels from different parts of the world try to represent socially diverse people and places without stereotyping, idealizing, or exoticizing them. This approach challenges core models of reading that dominate postcolonial studies, and suggests how scholars, in partnership with fiction writers, might begin to articulate new approaches to the problem of representing those considered "others."

I also work extensively in memory studies with a strong focus on a global body of literature concerned with the problems of reconciliation after mass conflict. With Rosanne Kennedy and Lia Kent, I co-edited a special issue of Memory Studies on Memory, Activism and the Arts in Asia and the Pacific that offers new perspectives on the memory-activism nexus. Focusing on an era of international courts, truth commissions, political apologies, and commemorative work, my additional research in memory studies investigate how literature from the turn of the millennium contributes to process of social restoration. In particular, my work explores how people considered “outsiders” to mass conflict might have a role to play in grappling with its aftermath.

While my first love is the novel, my publications have also analysed nontraditional literary spaces such as cookbooks and microfinance websites. My essays have appeared in Public Culture, South Asia, Memory Studies, Social Text, and other journals. 

BA, Yale University, PhD, Stanford University

Literary, gender and cultural studies; contemporary India and its diaspora; yoga studies; feminist critique; memory studies; creative research methods