Bengali Harlem

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

This film affected me remarkably. As an individual of mixed races, I am all too familiar with the dilemma of being caught between cultures and I thought that Imitation of Life captured the failure of American binaries perfectly. It was only by overcoming my desire to be stereotypically beautiful (read: white), was I able to recognize my own place independent of racial expectations. The unresolved ending between Lora and Susie in the 1959 version seems to represent the lack of resolution regarding race. Although troublesome endings may have been a convention of postclassical films, [Douglas] Sirk forces the audience to consider the future of Lora, Steve and Susie, and, in the process, alludes to the unresolved issues of Sarah Jane’s existence. Annie’s death may have forced her to recognize her misgivings as a daughter, but her life as a light-skinned young woman has only begun, just as our battle with civil rights.

Charisse L’Pree, “Imitation of Life,” Charisse L’Pree, Ph.D.: The Media Made Me Crazy, April 20, 2005. https://charisselpree.me/2005/04/20/imitation-of-life/.

Bengali Harlem

Bengali Harlem

The Brian Lehrer Show
WNYC 93.9 FM/ 820 AM
2013-01-11

Brian Lehrer, Host

Vivek Bald, Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Media
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Vivek Bald, documentary director and assistant professor of writing and digital media at MIT and the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, reveals the little known history of early South Asian immigrants, from Tremé to Harlem.

→explore the Bengali Harlem website, including an excerpt from Aladdin Ullah’s one-man show here.

Download the interview here. Stream m3u here. (00:14:12).

Tags: Brian Lehrer, Vivek Bald, WNYC

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2013 at 16:33Z and is filed under Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, Audio, History, Media Archive, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

Bengali Harlem

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