Undergraduate Graduate Faculty Events Current Searches CAAH Home

 

  Dr. Nitasha Sharma
Assistant Professor of African American Studies & Asian American Studies

Address:
African American Studies Department
3-131 Crowe
1880 S. Campus Dr.
Evanston, IL 60208-2209

Fax: 847-467-0448

Email:
n-sharma@northwestern.edu

Courses:

AFAM 214-1: Comparative Race Relations: Asian and Black Relations in the U.S. (Fall 2006)

Comparative Race Relations: Asian and Black Relations in the U.S. (Spring 2007)

Hapa Issues: Asian Americans of Mixed Racial Descent (Spring 2007)

Degree:

Anthropology, University of California Santa Barbara (2004)

Current Research:

Claiming Space, Making Race: Second Generation South Asian American Hip Hop Artists , Dr. Sharma's ethnographic study of South Asian American hip hop artists analyzes how they use black popular culture to create and express alliances with Blacks as people of color. She examines Black and South Asian race relations in order to document how immigrants insert themselves into existing racial hierarchies and, in the process, develop new discourses of "race." During the summer of 2005, Professor Sharma conducted preliminary fieldwork in Trinidad on douglas--people of African and Indian descent--in order to expand her focus on Indian/Black relations beyond the U.S. and to develop her interest in mixed race studies.

Recent Awards:

Mellon 3-year post-doctoral fellowship, Duke University (2004)

Graduate Fellow, Institute for the Study of Social Change, UC Berkeley (2003-2004).

Recent Publications:

"Down by Law: The Effects and Responses of Copyright Restrictions on Sampling in Rap." In the /Journal of Political and Legal Anthropology. (5/99)

"Rotten Coconuts and Other Strange Fruit: A Slice of Hip Hop from the West Coast." In the /South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection. (11/01)

"Hip Hop, Cross Racial Identifications, and the Post 9/11 Racialization of Second Generation South Asians." In /Journal of Hip-Hop/, Vol. 2, Issue 1. Washington, DC, 2006

(Chapter forthcoming) "The Sounds of Social Consciousness: South Asian Rappers on Capitalism, Sexism, and Racism." In _Essays in Inequality and Injustice_, Kira Hall, ed. Meerut, India: Archana Publishers.

(Book Forthcoming, in progess) Claiming Space, Making Race: Second Generation South Asian American Hip Hop Artists. Duke University Press.

Top