AsPr Shameem Black
BA, Yale University, PhD, Stanford University
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-in-chief 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. Flexible India was awarded an Honorable Mention by the Association for Asian American Studies. You can listen to a conversation on the book on the New Books Network.
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. It 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 research in memory studies has investigated how literature from the turn of the millennium contributes to processes of social restoration.
Research Interest
Literary, gender and cultural studies; contemporary India and its diaspora; yoga studies; feminist critique; memory studies; creative research methods
PhD Supervision (Current)
Lee Grant (primary supervisor/chair), “Ancestral Constellations: The Visual Aesthetics of Post-Memory and Genealogical Imagination in the Aftermath of the Korean War”
Mamta Sachan Kumar (primary supervisor/chair), “The Story of ‘Nothing’: An Inquiry into the Lives of Japan’s Sindhi Merchant Housewives”
Sophie Constable (primary supervisor/chair), "Memories of 20th Century Nikkei in Australia and Tonga”
Wasia Arshad (associate supervisor), “Exploring Impacts of Medicinal Plant Pharmaceuticalization on Indigenous Communities in Pakistan: Understanding the Importance of Indigenous Knowledge”
Aryana Mohmood (associate supervisor), “How Afghan Womens Resist: Emotions and Power in Resistance and Representations”
Shireen Hafesjee (associate supervisor), “South-east, South and West Asians in Australian Literature, 1800s-2020s”
Ayesha Chaudry (associate supervisor), “To Marry or Not To Marry? Delayed and Non-marriages Among Urban Female Pakistani Muslims”
Kavya Kalutantiri (associate supervisor), “Appeasing the Palate in Cosmopolitan Cities: An Exploration of South Asian Diasporic Subjectivity through Foodways”
Edmario Lesi (associate supervisor), “Shame and HIV/AIDS in North American Gay Short Fiction from the 1980s to 1990s”
PhD Supervision (Completed)
Geoff Piggott (primary supervisor/chair), “Shifting the Field: The Story of Australia’s Negotiation of India’s Rise to Power in Cricket”
(PhD awarded 2024)
Rosanna Stevens (primary supervisor/chair), “White Fantasy, Indigenous Sovereignty: Experiencing Tools for an Ethics of Racialised Writing Practice” (PhD awarded 2024)
Tayyaba Malik (primary supervisor/chair), “Women in Islamist Parties: A Case Study of Jamaat Islami in Pakistan and AK Party in Turkey” (PhD awarded 2024)
Myra Mentari Abubakar (primary supervisor/chair), “Cut Nyak Din (1848-1908): A Study of Female Heroism in Indonesia” (PhD awarded 2024)
Shvetal Vyas Pare (associate supervisor), “Vernacular Nationalism and Imagining the Political: The Development of Gujarati Identity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” (PhD awarded 2023)
Vihanga Perera (associate supervisor), Water Under the Bridge: A Novel (Exegesis: Remembering Torture: Survivor Narratives of the 1987-90 Insurgency in Sri Lanka) (PhD awarded 2021)
Bianca Hennessy (associate supervisor), “The Possibilities of Decolonial Pacific Studies: Learning from an Oceanic Genealogy of Transformative Academic Practice” (PhD awarded 2021)
Qiong He (associate supervisor), “Nothing Can Happen Nowhere: Trauma and Place in Elizabeth Bowen’s Writing” (PhD awarded 2021)
Stella Jang (associate supervisor), “Dreams and Agency: The Journey of Filipino Migrant Wives in South Korea” (PhD awarded 2020)
Ashma Sharma (associate supervisor), “Transnational Lives, Relational Selves: South Asian Diasporic Memoirs” (PhD awarded 2018)
Anuparna Mukherjee (associate supervisor), “The Haunted City: Calcutta and the Legacy of Nostalgia” (PhD awarded 2018)
Melissa Jogie (associate supervisor), “The Great Tradition of Texts: How to Break the Mold? A Study of English Education in Australia and England” (PhD awarded 2017)
Annie McCarthy (associate supervisor), “Under Development: Stories of Children and NGOs in Delhi, India” (PhD awarded 2016)
2017 John Legge Prize for Best Thesis in Asian Studies
Elen Turner (associate supervisor), From Recovery to Consolidation: Indian Feminist Publishing, 1984-Present” (PhD awarded 2012)