Adi Kumar

Visiting Scholar

Adi Kumar is a historian of migration, social movements, and South Asian America. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University, and received his PhD in History from Yale University in 2026. His dissertation, Diaspora Defiant: Indian Americans, the Third World, and India’s 1975 Emergency, is the first full-length study of Indian American organizing against the Emergency (1975–1977), Indira Gandhi’s twenty-one-month suspension of civil liberties. Drawing on institutional and community-based archives across North America and more than fifty oral history interviews, it traces how activists repurposed a decade of diasporic organizing, built across civic-liberal, revolutionary Marxist, and development-politics registers, into a transnational campaign against authoritarian rule. The project’s larger arc follows the decline of the diasporic Left and the concurrent rise of the diasporic Hindu Right into the 1990s.

Participating Years

2026–2027

Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.