Author Archives: Calynn Dowler

Review: Bengali Harlem by Vivek Bald

September 12, 2013 · by · in History, Literature · Leave a comment

Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America is a highly detailed and beautifully written account of the lives of South Asian immigrants who arrived in the United States between the 1890s and 1940s. In piecing together the stories of this early immigrant group, Bald draws on census records, marriage licenses, […]

Review: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

July 18, 2013 · by · in History, Literature · Leave a comment

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration Isabel Wilkerson, 2011, Vintage Books: New York. Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk The United States is a nation of immigrants. What is often overlooked is that it has also historically been a land of dynamic internal movement. Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic […]

World Refugee Day 2013: Moving beyond trauma, honoring resilience

June 20, 2013 · by · in Culture & Integration, Public Discourse · 1 Comment

Contemporary public discourses of “the refugee” conjure images of sprawling, squalid camps, of huddled passengers on flimsy boats, of malnourished bodies and hollow eyes. Everyone knows “the refugee” is dispossessed and disempowered, trapped  in limbo and confined to the margins of the global system of nation-states. But today we are celebrating World Refugee Day, and […]

Dividing the Sky: the Fortification of the U.S.-Mexico Border

May 24, 2013 · by · in Politics & Policy · 1 Comment

“No other border in the world exhibits the inequality of power, economics, and the human condition as does this one.” (Alvarez) The “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013” is slowly making its way through the American Congressional system, and it has been brilliantly summarized here by The Migrationist’s Amy Grenier. While […]

UK Immigration Clampdown Tears Families Apart

February 20, 2013 · by · in Personal Stories, Politics & Policy · 10 Comments

I thought I knew about immigration policy. I read about it, I wrote about it. I even studied it. I went to lectures, where people with multiple degrees presented complex economic models and talked at length about border security, and visas, and ‘managing migration’. But in late January, for the first time, I felt it. […]