#south asian diaspora
On National Coming Out Day, Thursday, October 11th, 2012, a coalition of South Asian lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) organizations and individuals in the U.S. will launch DeQH, the first South Asian LGBTQ national helpline. DeQH offers free, confidential, culturally sensitive peer support, information and resources by telephone for LGBTQ South Asian individuals, families and friends around the globe. The intent is to provide a safe and supportive ear for callers to share their concerns, questions, struggles or hopes through conversations with trained LGBTQ South Asian Peer Support Volunteers.
Callers can reach the helpline at (908) FOR-DEQH (908-367-3374) 8pm-10pm on Thursdays and Sundays, Eastern Standard Time [5-7pm PST]. Days and times will expand over time.
For general information, check out www.deqh.org and contact [email protected].
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Hari Kondabolu breaks down Indian-American representation within U.S. media on W. Kamau Bell’s new show Totally Biased.
Submitted by Hari Kondabolu
Hari Kondabolu‘s debut on Conan!
Rosina Kazi
One of the foot soldiers in Toronto’s underground music scene, Rosina Kazi is the lead singer of the band LAL and she has recorded with State of Bengal, Toronto Tabla Ensemble, Titonton, Moonstarr, Abacus, da grassroots and more. She has been instrumental in the growth of many of the City’s artists and DJ’s, providing venues and forums for their musical expression. More importantly, she has managed to add an air of consciousness and political awareness to many of those events, and this awareness is the most distinctive factor of her music. She grew up in the Canadian-Bangladeshi community where politics and art went hand in hand. She grew up singing and dancing traditional Bengali folk music and dance and went on to play in choirs and bands up until high school.
Rosina teaches and performs spoken word, which is another outlet for her passion for community and art. Through her community arts organization, ‘COMMUNITY CENTRE’, Rosina also works with youth and facilitates spoken word, song-writing and indie art making programs. Rosina created COMMUNITY CENTRE to teach youth and to support artists who needed support with their own projects. Thus far COMMUNITY CENTRE has produced three albums, for Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah (supported by the OAC), Brazilian singer Luanda Jones (OAC and Canada Council) and Queer Dance Music Artist Troy Jackson.
Rosina has been composing music professionally for over 12 years. She has recorded 4 albums with the band LAL, and has guest appeared on over 10 recordings (from techno to folk music albums). She also plays harmonium, and composes using samplers and laptops. Her passion is connecting with different communities and having a conversation through words and music. One of the ways she does this is to also program different festivals and community based programs such Masala Mehndi Masti, Afro Latin South Asian Festival, and Mayworks. She has created a style that incorporates her singing voice and her love of reciting poetry, which is very much informed by hip hop and spoken word cultures. She continues to teach spoken word workshops for organizations like Diaspora Dialogues, Buddies in Bad Times, AQSA Zine Collective, The Royal Music Conservatory and more.
Find out more about Rosina, lal and her revolutionary music here:
Brown Eyed Warrior - Lal-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1zRJ9JIlE
Murr ft. Rosina - My Best Dress:http://vimeo.com/24029446
lal website-http://cargocollective.com/lal/Blog
submitted by warningshots
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Starting today in New York City, please show up and support YaliniDream as she joins Adeeba Rana and Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai on stage for six sure to be heart moving performances.
An excerpt from an article published on Colorlines:
In the eleven years since that fateful morning, the world has changed, and so has Tsai. This week, the spoken word artist and New York City resident debuts her new theater ensemble “Say You Heard My Echo.” The new work explores the impact of 9/11 and its aftermath on three Asian American women: an activist, a veteran who’s returned home, and a woman whose family has been affected by interrogation. Each woman is in conversation with a spiritual figure: Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s female disciple; Guan Yin (associated with compassion as venerated by East Asian buddhists); and Aisha (one of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives).
“Sometimes people talk about 9/11 as a very different moment in time, that it’s just something that happened and now we’re in a different place,” Tsai told Colorlines.com. “But I think that people’s lives went in a different direction. People started to reorganize their relationships, their priorities and their values, the ways in which they moved across the city.”
The context for the work is decidedly political. The past decade has seen an unprecedented expansion of U.S. military action, domestically and abroad. Thousands have been killed in recognized wars, while the Obama Administration’s continued use of unmaned drones to kill suspected enemies around the world has come under increased scrutiny. New York City has also become the testing ground for aggressive and controversial surveillance of its residents, particularly in Muslim communities. The NYPD has set up vast spying networks of Muslim Student Associations along the East Coast, and set up a special division to keep an eye on Muslim community spaces. Seth Freed Wessler reported for Colorlines.com that none of those efforts ever gleaned a single lead or terrorism-related investigation.
For Tsai, those politics fed into what ultimately became a collective project. She approached the idea of the play on last year’s anniversary. Nico Daswani, program manager at the Asian American Arts Alliance, gave Tsai a writing prompt that asked her to explore the impact of 9/11 on Asian American communities. What followed was months of writing and re-writing, journaling and pushing past moments of writer’s block. And the work was guided, editing, and shaped by a community of artists, including director Jesse Y. Jou, Flushing Townhall Workshop Production, and the Asian Women’s Giving Circle. Not to mention the more than 150 people who raised over than $8,000 on Kickstarter to help fund the project.
To find out out more information including ticket information, please visit Say You Heard My Echo’s Facebook page
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