Subject
Activism, Organisations, Idenity, Politics, Desh Pardesh, South Asian, arts festival, oral history, race
Description
Paramjit Rai was a volunteer and co-coordinator at Desh Pardesh for a number of years. She discusses her experience as a social policy worker and academic at the festival and how this role of “outsider” informed her perspective on the festival. She also discusses race politics and identity formation both in the Toronto political climate and specifically within the Desh Pardesh festival. Rai goes on to conclude that a Desh festival could recur in the modern day, but for it to happen there needs to be an urgency, a need for something by the modern youth.