Reading South Asia
Mothers and Daughters: Anita Desai and Kirin Desai
Date:
Friday, March 22, 1-3 p.m.
Price: $40 ($35 members)
Books:
Inheritance of Loss, Kirin Desai
The Artist of Disappearance, Anita Desai
REFUND POLICY: Please note that we can issue class refunds up until seven (7) days before the first class session.
This class will explore the intertwined and overlapping personal and literary worlds of writer Anita Desai and daughter, Kirin Desai, winner of the 2006 Man Booker prize for her novel, Inheritance of Loss. Exploring India’s vanished pasts and landscapes of dispossession against the force of modernization, the class will examine themes of language, cultural identity and the persistence of memory in the fates of those characters who leave India and those who remain behind.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Alexandra Viets is a screenwriter and journalist with a background in South Asia who received her MFA degree from Columbia University. Her first feature-length screenplay, Cotton Mary, won a New York Foundation for the Arts award and was produced by Merchant Ivory. She is currently in pre-production on Ask Me No Questions, a feature film about a Bangladeshi family fleeing NYC post 9/11, and Hijabi Girls, a documentary about Muslim-American teenage girls who wear the hijab. She has also completed Kashmir, a screenplay set in modern day Kashmir and The Bibighar, a wartime drama of 1857 India. A frequent contributor to the Asian Wall Street Journal, her film/theater reviews have also appeared in The International Herald Tribune and The Far Eastern Economic Review. She is the recipient of the Paul Newman Award for screenwriting and an award from the National Film Development Council in Mumbai. She teaches in Baltimore at Towson University's Department of Theater Arts, specializing in film and literature of South Asia. She is a 2011 Fellow with the National Endowment for Humanities in South Asian literature, history and art.
