Sandhya Shukla on Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place

This discussion is with Dr. Sandhya Shukla is associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia,

where she is also an affiliate faculty member of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. She is the author of India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England (Princeton University Press, 2003), and a co-editor of Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame (Duke University Press, 2007). Her work has appeared in academic publications such as American Quarterly, symploke, and Annual Review of Anthropology, as well as the news-oriented The Conversation. In this discussion, we explore her most recent work Cross-Cultural Harlem: Reimagining Race and Place (Columbia University Press, 2024). Dr. Shukla argues that cosmopolitanism and racial belonging need not be seen as contradictory. Cross-Cultural Harlem offers a vision of sustained dialogue to respond to the challenges of urban transformations and to affirm the future of Harlem as actual place and global symbol.

What is Conversations in Atlantic Theory?

These conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.