Brinda J. Mehta

About

Brinda Mehta is an award-winning scholar of postcolonial feminist literature and author of over 65 articles. Her areas of specialization include postcolonial literatures from Africa, the Caribbean, France, South Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East; Indian indenture studies; transnational feminisms; diaspora and migration studies. She is the author of five books, over sixty articles, and three co-edited volumes on postcolonial global south intellectual traditions.

Research topics

• Humanities
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Art
• Literature
• Philosophy
• Gender studies
• Aesthetics
• History

Selected publications

• Migritude and Kala Pani Routes in Shumona Sinha’s Assommons les pauvres (Let Us Strike Down the Poor)

  Minnesota Review · 2020 · 20 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  The term migritude was first coined by French theorist Jacques Chevrier to characterize “extracontinental” francophone sub-Saharan literatures that have their roots in negritude and immigration. Kenyan cultural artist Shailja Patel later expanded the term to include South Asian “migrants with attitude.” This article further expands the current framings of migritude by linking it to the historical movement of kala pani, or nineteenth-century Indian indenture. The idea of kala pani migritude revea…

  PublisherDOI

• Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices against Violence

  Journal of Middle East Women s Studies · 2018-07-01 · 12 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This is a response to Abdelkader Cheref’s review of my book Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices against Violence in this journal (13:3 [November 2017]: 438–41).Cheref was gratuitously patronizing, sloppy, and dismissive, as well as misinformed, in his review. I respond to only some of his egregious mistakes. Accusing me of essentialism for identifying the women writers whose works I analyze as Arab, Cheref offers genetic and racialized essentialisms as an alternative—for example, “Maghrebis…

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Jahaji-bahin</i>feminism: a de-colonial Indo-Caribbean consciousness

  South Asian Diaspora · 2020 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This essay examines the trope of jahaji-bahin consciousness through a de-colonial feminist lens to highlight the ways in which Indo-Caribbean women claim a sense of identity and belonging in the Caribbean while resisting colonial and patriarchal stereotypes, social marginality, and gender anomie in circumscribed spaces. What is the scope of jahaji-bahin consciousness as a form of de-colonial feminist thought? How does it engender localised forms of resistance to colonial and patriarchal forms of…

  PublisherDOI

• Contesting Militarized Violence in “Northeast India”

  Meridians · 2021-04-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The northeastern states of India have been positioned as India’s postcolonial other in mainstream politics with the aim to create xenophobic binaries between insider and outsider groups. Comprising the eight “sister” states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura, this region represents India’s amorphous shadowlands in arbitrary political markings between the mainland and the off-centered northeastern periphery. These satellite states have…

  PublisherDOI

• The Painful Road to Freedom in Maram al-Masri’s<i>Elle Va Nue la Liberté</i>(<i>Freedom Walks Naked</i>)

  Journal of Middle East Women s Studies · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This essay examines the poetry of the Francophone author Maram al-Masri, a diasporic feminist poet from Syria who has lived in exile in Paris since 1992. Elle va nue la liberté is an indictment of the regime of Bashar al-Assad and an ode to the creative resilience of ordinary people during the Syrian revolution (2011). This essay demonstrates how al-Masri’s poetry grafts landscapes of pain and resistance in a poetics of the gut that bears witness to horror, trauma, and resistance. It fo…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rajender Kaur

  Rhode Island College

  2 shared

• William A. Meiers

  Arcadia University

  2 shared

• Bidisha Banerjee

  1 shared

• Haifa Zangana

  1 shared

• Vibha Saxena

  University of Delhi

  1 shared

• Rajmohan Ramanathapillai

  Gettysburg College

  1 shared

• Paget Henry

  1 shared

• Vijay Lakshmi

  1 shared

Education

• B.A.

  Elphinstone College

• M.A.

  University of Bombay

• Ph.D.

  Brown University

Similar researchers at Northeastern University

• Cliff H. Leeh-52
• Mark G. Hendersonh-29
• David Bernsteinh-12