You can pre-order Dr. Gayatri Sethi’s book, Diaspora-ish, on Sambasivan & Parikh | First Person Press and everywhere else books are sold. It will hit the shelves on Feburary 3rd, 2026!

Dunyazad Project 

“Hi everyone, today I’m joined by someone special to me. She’s my beloved comrade aunty and someone I’ve been community with for several years. Aunty, the floor is yours. Feel free to introduce yourself.”

Dr. Gayatri Sethi

“I’m so honored and delighted to join Dunyazad Project for this interview. My name is Gayatri and I go by she/her pronouns and identify as an educator (broadly defined) or a cultural worker. I no longer teach or do research in academia, but I was an academic worker for a very long time and I belong to many diasporas. South Asian, African, and even those in Turtle Island so I identify as a diasporic person of the global majority”

Dunyazad Project

“Okay, beautiful! That is amazing. So today, we’re here to talk about your book, Diasporaish. How would you describe your book and who are you trying to reach with it?”

Dr. Gayatri Sethi

“Thank you for spending time reading this book and for these inquiries that you’ve prepared for me. The book is very much an experiment you know, just like with the Dunyazad Project you are curating–the kind of stories, accounts, and narratives that we might not find easily.

What I tried to do was to create something in book form, which was an experimental account of what it means to live, be, and exist in the diaspora.

 As I mentioned before, I, like you, am a person of the Panjabi diaspora. My ancestors are Panjabi, my kin are Panjabi, and yet I did not grow up anywhere in proximity to Panjab, especially not the original Panjab before it was partitioned. So what I wanted to do was take these sorts of experiences of making our lives and livelihoods and diaspora and create something experimental with it. The book is very much that. As you might be able to relate, being a person who is a member of a diaspora means that there are a lot of disconnections. Many things are true at once. Sometimes there are a lot of contradictions and there is a lot of push and pull. 

Our mind might be with the students at Panjab university— protesting against the central government occupying their university, but our heart might be with the people in Sudan—who are coping with the ongoing three years of proxy war. We might also at the same time, be doing mutual aid for people, and knowing that their tents are flooded in the winter. That’s our lived experience and so I wanted to try to bring some of that. Multiple things are true at once, things are disconnected, sometimes contradictory. 

I really was trying to reach people who don’t have their own life experiences easily reflected in books and newspapers and magazines and even social media. The people who might be on the margins of the margins— those are the kinds of people that I’m in community with and we know that we don’t find ourselves reflected back to us. We don’t find ourselves either in theory that we might read in academic spaces or in conventional literature, so I really did try to write something experimental for exactly those kinds of people.”

Dunyazad Project 

“That’s really well said honestly. I feel like as I was reading, it was really making me question what identity even is. We talked about this the first time we had a community conversation in the form of a teach-in (more so laid-back and a dialogue between people who attended). We talked about identity as it pertains to the Combahee River Collective, Patricia Hill Collins, and solidarity politics. 

I feel like this book does a great job in opposing identity reductionism and gives a lens on what it means to have power imbalances within our community and how these systems of oppression exist, but aren’t often talked about because it’s easier to talk about our marginalizations rather than our privileges and what we’re benefiting from (whether that’s casteism or classism or anything along those lines). I feel like this book truly shows us the importance of not not treating the umbrella term of “South Asian”, as being an excuse to undermine lived experiences that may contradict those unifying characteristics that liberal politics or politics that treat us like a homologous entity are trying to persuade others into believing.”

Dr. Gayatri Sethi

“Exactly.”

Dunyazad Project

“I saw that you had made some public appreciation posts for the graphic designer who helped you design the cover for your books and she looks so cool! I really wanted to give her the flowers she deserves so I wanted to ask: Who is she? How did you guys meet and what was it like for an artistic vision to come to life?

I had seen on Instagram you posted about how she took different aspects of photos and other personal artifacts into the cover of Diasporaish. I just wanted to hear you talk about that little more!”

Dr. Gayatri Sethi

“Yeah, I adore Annika. She is somebody very dear to me. I think what you perceived in this is that you know that the book isn’t just a book right. It is a set of relationships and the relationship with Annika was over the years. She also worked on the first iteration of this book and during that time she was the book designer, but didn’t do the cover and it had been my wish for her to do so if that original book that’s out of print ever get a new life. Which you know, we have thankfully and I am thankful to Ambika and Suhani at Sambasivan & Parikh for giving this book that new life.

The reason relationships matter is because there’s no way that you could see words on a page and then bring them to the kind of unique design styles that we have used unless there’s a relationship between the writer of the words, the designer of how those words show up on the page, and the team who is editing it to bring it into the world in the form of a book. With both books, it was important to me that we build those relationships and those relationships are that invisible energy behind the work that you see when you hold the book. I think that is a kind of not-obvious aspect of the book that you picked up on because you’re really intuitive, insightful, and pay attention to the invisible. 

The thing with Annika is the way that she has put the words on the pages in the Google sheet (At the time it was Google. We shouldn’t use Google anymore). In the document that she received, there were notes I would add (e.g. type setting notes). Let’s say on page 105 I have put the Africanish ways and then put various words in concentric circles and a note for that. If she and I didn’t have a relationship with each other, she would not have been able to translate my vision and then be able to put it on the page with her design, mojo and finesse in her artistry and she has impeccable artistry. I hope that when people hold this book, they’ll be able to really admire the artistry.

She’s really a crucial part of the book team. We have spent years building relationships with each other. We’re now almost like a chosen family to each other. Our children know each other, we’ve enjoyed meals together, and gone to tea parties together. There’s much more to that relationship that permits the book to be made possible. I don’t think an impersonal designer would’ve been able to do justice to the kind of experimental work that Diaspora-ish is, and so Annika was a very intentional and relational part of the process.”

Dunyazad Project

“You said that beautifully. It really takes a village. We’re shaped by people and things we surround ourselves with and that journey that you talk about really transcends beyond you and beyond just words on a page. Honestly, I feel like this book is an artifact of what solidarity looks like in practice: in relationships and in building something that again, extends beyond just us.

Many authors talk about the struggles of the process of publishing. I would love to hear your thoughts. How has your experience been working with and in the publishing industry and what advice would you give to someone who is considering this route?”

Dr. Gayatri Sethi

“This is a really tender topic and question but a necessary one. I understand why you would ask me this because this interview is going to be shared with the Dunyazad Project’s readers and creators. With absolute respect and earnest admiration for your efforts in the Dunyazad Project, I want to answer the question emphasizing how important it is right now for us to create our own ways of storytelling, our own ways of sharing information, public education, political education, and to disrupt the norms of what publishing and publication looks like. 

I have great hopes for Dunyazad Project being able to really shift some important things. You make your content freely accessible and that is profound. By contrast, the publishing world as we know it is an arm of empire, and just like we talk about academia being an arm of empire, we know that media is too. Conventional media journalism publishing will collapse and I have every confidence that it will collapse because some of us should be working actively to make it so. 

 I didn’t write a book seeking any kind of publishing accolades or with any of the usual investments.This is published by a small, South Asian, women owned press. It’s an independent press that is not funded by any large corporation. It is basically a community effort of South Asian readers who really believe in creating anti-casteist literature for the diaspora. They have really put in their time, talents, and treasures and invested them into creating new kinds of things. That is why I went with a small press. I am not agented and I will not be gatekept by the sort of author/writer/publishing industry norms for what gets to count as a book that is worthy of being agented let alone what’s worthy of being published. 

I want to be really earnest in saying that the majority of the books that we see published In the West, especially in the so-called “United States” are very narrow in what kind of stories get told and by whom. Even though there was some work done in the last 20 years or so to diversify the bookshelf, what has not happened is to extend that into changing any norms about how to be, what a book looks like, etc.

For example, I use multiple words and multiple languages and I don’t necessarily footnote them or italicize them because diaspora people speak multiple languages and have multiple points of reference at any point. I didn’t want to have to explain this to the people who are the gatekeepers in publishing or even in academic publishing to say why I made some unconventional choices and why I say things exactly the way I say them.  For those reasons, this isn’t this book that’s going to easily fit in a bookshelf. The first iteration of the book was lowkey banned because it wasn’t even stocked at most libraries. Library systems in the US require books to have a trade review and the trade reviewers tend not to review the books by small presses like the ones that I’ve been publishing with. 

There’s just layers and layers to the question about publishing that we could go into but what I want to emphasize out of all that is that we can expropriate resources. We could create our own literature. That is why I love zines so much. As conventional media and publishing collapse, which I really emphasize that they will (they have already begun that process) zines give me great delight because people have decided to take into their own sort of sense of audacity and write things exactly as they want them written and share them freely. I think we should probably be bringing more zine energy into the world, more “dunya azad” energy, and more literal energy of worldly liberations and investing less in sort of conventional norms of publishing. 

That is kind of my vision for this book: to be torn apart, pages being taken out, zines being created from the work. To making it redundant even. It is not the kind of book that was created to just sit on the shelf in the library. It’s the kind of workbook that I’m hoping will be taken apart and used and utilized and shared the way that zines are.”

Dunyazad Project

“The horrors persist but so do we. We become our own alternatives in the face of censorship and gatekeeping and there’s a lot to tackle and a lot to brainstorm. 

This is not your first book so I wanted to ask: In what ways is Diaspora-ish different from your first book Unbelonging? Are there any specific lessons you’ve learned or perspectives you’ve changed your position on?”

Dr. Gayatri Sethi

“So many. I’ll try to touch on a few, but yes, thank you. You have seen both versions, I think you perceived that there are shifts that were necessary.

 The first one I wrote when I had recently exited academia. I knew that in order to continue to do the work of education as sort of unaffiliated educator, I might need a book as an excuse to still be invited to visit classrooms and to be able to do work that I really cared about and did for two decades almost (or more). That is why I created that. I used to teach courses in global studies in which we would do units on identity, on on globalization, on culture. It was written when DEI mode was so active within academia. Everybody was talking DEI and many colleges and universities had started to add the word “belonging” to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives on their campuses that were aimed to bring in students who were marginalized in some way. I felt like I really had something to say about the notion of belonging within those conversations.  I spent a great deal of time taking the kind of resources I used to use when I taught students and so it was initially created for 18-19 year-old students. That is why it’s like a young adult nonfiction. That’s kind of where it sits on a shelf in the library or in an independent bookstore. I didn’t see much in that shelf of non-fiction for young adults, so I wanted to create something for that. I wanted it to be experimental, but also be an excuse for me to come and visit students and continue to do the work I care about.

We are now in a different time. Five years later, we are in a time where multiple genocides are unfolding. We are in a time where we realize that identity talk is actually reductionist. You had said so in so many words just a few minutes ago in this interview. I think more people are beginning to realize that the DEI mode and the wording doesn’t necessarily mean what we think it means that we need to maybe interrogate that some more. So in this iteration of the book, what I did was I drastically revised the first first book and because it’s out of print, I knew that readers would need that context before they’d be able to understand the new content that’s in Diaspora-ish. I spent more than a year taking the original manuscript and revising it drastically for a new time with new lessons, new learnings, and a new narrative. 

The first book did question the idea of belonging and I think it did that effectively. What it didn’t do was answer the questions about “how does identity matter or not matter?”, “what’s the point of identifying?”, “what are we doing all this identity talk for anyways?”, “what is the point of belonging anyways”, “what do we belong to and who do we belong to?” These were questions I asked, but I didn’t necessarily answer the question of “what are what are the pitfalls of identity talk?” and I don’t think I really addressed that “so what?” question. 

When I witnessed in the last three years that many people who might’ve read the book when genocide started to unfold, especially this iteration of genocide in Palestine, and then multiple world unmaking events are occurring, that the same people who care about book bans and supposedly care about fascism do not care about genocide. They do not care about Sudan, won’t even say the word “Kashmir”. That is when I began to say oh wait, there are some lessons that need to be added into this new book that really speak to what is our responsibility once we identify, once we answer the question “who are our people?” Then we have work to do and understanding what’s our responsibility to each other into the world. That is where most of the new content in the book does work to extend diaspora experiences, but also in the diaspora, what what does revolution mean? What does it mean to live revolutionary lives? What does it mean to be an anti- imperialist? What is this notion of solidarity? People can use the word “solidarity” and “decolonize” a lot, especially within the academic circles we are part of, people use those words, but they don’t necessarily know how to practice them. I think in Diaspora-ish I was very intentional in redoing it to be able to explicitly offer some observations about lack of solidarity and what does solidarity require of us. That word in particular gets used you know, almost frivolously by people who may have read theory and teach about concepts like decolonization, but have been sorely lacking in their praxis.

 If anything, if there’s any work I wish this book to do, it’s to invite readers to ask themselves: How are they living? How are they practicing? Whether their ideology is one of communism, whether they identify as an anarchist, whether they identify as an intersectional person whatever their identifications may be ideologically or with lived categories (of race, caste, class, sexuality,etc.) that the question really isn’t how you identify but to what work do we put those identifications collectively. 

One of the pieces in the book is about how identity starts with “i” so it’s a lot about “i”. The reason that both books are not memoirs is because I don’t believe in naval gazing and I don’t believe in “iii” because so what? Diaspora-ish does much more work in moving the “i” to the “we”. Constantly, this question of the collective gets brought up in a more intentional and repeated manner which I did not do in the first book. 

Those are some ways in which I had to do some intentional work: in things that I have been hinting at in the first book but wasn’t explicit about, and things that I realized that I may have fallen short on. I tried to kind of foreground a little bit more. All of that to say that even this book isn’t finished. I’m hoping that even within 2-3 years from now, we will be in a world and sense of awareness that I’ll look back on this and be like “Yeah I kinda need to revise that!” because isn’t that what life is? We have to constantly be unlearning, learning, and relearning so I used that language a lot more intentionally in Diaspora-ish to signal that I don’t know everything. Even in this book, it’s not a finished thing because I’m also going to constantly commit to unlearning and relearning. I’m hoping readers will do the same so there’s that energy woven into the book as well. I hope you perceived that. Did you pick up on that energy when you read the book?”

Dunyazad Project

“I definitely did.

 First off, I want to say I love your framework. No matter what someone identifies as, it is important that see ourselves as liberationists. “No one is free until all of us are free.”I realize that it’s important for us to change that “i” to “us” or to the “we”.

This kind of shifted gears in the sense of how we talk about how reactionary politics get exacerbated in times of crisis. With that, so must our commitment to be revolutionary more radical with our own responses. I feel like this book in specific focused more on imagining alternatives rather than just focusing on the issues with the current ideas of things in terms of identity and belonging and solidarity.  How do we create something different? What is alternative? How do we build that alternative? Those are questions I ask myself, but those are questions we should all be asking and that shift in positionality is really important right now, especially when building global solidarity. I feel like this book really took that into account when it had its position on how it was addressing different issues—whether that was marginalization and identity of self, it was still more effective in talking about how that pertains to identities across the board and how that looks like extending beyond borders.”

Dr. Gayatri Sethi

“Yeah, I am so encouraged by your reflection that this came through because I also wanted to leave it, not be didactic. That is very ironic, it’s ironic for someone who was an educator to say I didn’t want the book to didactic. There are times where it inevitably is and you know I own up to that as that’s just a voice that you know, I inevitably fall into having been an educator for so long, but I really wanted to do the kind of didactic that invites both self-reflection and collective reflection. 

Very often in pedagogy circles, educators will talk a big talk about pedagogies of resistance or pedagogy of hope or pedagogy of  liberation but what we don’t do so effectively is to mobilize the ways in which those happen.  One of the backgrounds to this book is that having spent a lot of time with learners of all ages, pedagogy is woven into the book in various ways. In inviting students, learners, readers to pause, reflect, research. Don’t use AI but go look up if you find a term that you’ve never heard before. Circle it, go look it up, create your own glossary of terms. At  the end of each subsection, I ask intentional questions, I even give clues of which theorists might be able to answer those questions. I create little, fill it in yourself mind maps for students especially, or learners of any age who might engage this book with a learning mindset.  

I did that very intentionally to be less didactic, but to kind of show rather than tell what it looks like to be an active learner who understands that we can’t just use terms like liberation and solidarity without doing the very intentional, lifelong struggle. Struggle work of learning and learning, and learning again, and changing our minds and rethinking our positions. I tried to bring that in a real tangible way to the book in those sections with the pages. Look up these key terms, look up these particular instances of history, and read these theoretical sort of frameworks. Those clues are spaces to reflect and self reflect or even to bring those same questions to the collective to do discussion circles with. 

I kind of built those into the books so it’s kind of unusual that way. Readers who haven’t seen that before in a book find that a little bit different, it takes them aback because that’s it’s not expected for them.”

Dunyazad Project

“Yeah, also you said show rather than tell and honestly I would say to me it was more so to experience.

To experience a shift in framework and being challenged like I know there are a lot of like reflection invitations, and with this book specifically, many times you invited people to talk about the difference between colonialism and imperialism, culture and imperialism, systems of oppression, and things of that sort. At first you start off vaguely mentioning those concepts and then it slowly transitions into specific instances like you mentioned the 1984 Sikh genocide and Kashmir. These are aspects of those more broader umbrella terms that get neglected when we’re talking about these more comprehensive identities and you know if we are going to be talking about comprehensive histories and having discussions we need to talk about the people being left at the margins the most. They should be the people at the forefront. 

With that, I would like to ask my next question. Of course, we’re guided by many revolutionaries and liberationists. This includes theorists we look up to, but also people we find ourselves shaped by in our daily lives. Who would you say most inspires you in the work that you put out?”

Dr. Gayatri Sethi

“What a meaningful question. I hope to do justice to this question and you know the limitations to this. I know that I’ll be thinking about this question for a very long time so thank for the gift of this question. 

The times that we are currently struggling through, it is hard pressed to find inspiration and we are often resisting despair on the daily. For many of us, who are in a long-term commitment to liberation & to collective liberation, Many things are not new and yet the world is trying to macro gaslight into thinking that something that happens today might be new. 

I’m constantly in this questioning mode and often that questioning mode is misinterpreted as being pessimistic. There is the afropessimism sort of framework that I rely on.The pessimism is actually necessary and because multiple things are true at once, abolitionists teach us that while we’re pessimistic about the state of the world and systems of oppression, and bring criticality and critique to those systems, we need to be seeding alternatives and asking the question of “what else is possible?” I use that question a couple of times in Diaspora-ish and in the concluding section to end with a set of questions about what else is possible (inspired by abolitionists).

There and indeed many revolutionaries, both living and who have passed on. A couple of people  that have recently passed on that have really been in my heart a lot are Assata Shakur, and Alice Wong who passed away recently. She of course was a tireless advocate for disability justice and someone who I did not cite in my books but I learned tremendously from and was inspired by constantly. For the last 2+ years when people have said things like ‘let’s practice things like self care during genocide’ I have said no no no, that’s not it. Our assignment is not lean into individualist notions of identity or self-care and restrict ourselves to the self. The more the world unravels, the more the fascist imperialists take on the world, the more we have work to do to build alternatives and be defiant of the messages of retreat to your own selfish needs. We are constantly having to dig deeply to find praxis. 

To answer your question in a roundabout way, I want to mention that the people who inspire me the most in this moment are people who engage in armed struggle against imperialism, you can fill in the blanks as to who those people might be. People who embody a material solidarity— so they get together and organize to keep people alive in their local communities as well as broadly understanding that solidarity means that we don’t see any difference in our lived existence. Whether that’s where we live— in the diaspora or those who are experiencing climate catastrophe, whether that be in the Philippines last week or Jamaica last week. We see connections between the ways the floods in Panjab have been impacting families for many generations in the same way we see the catastrophes such as Hurricane Melissa in the Carribbean. The people who see those connections inspire me. The people who say ‘We have work to do to keep each other alive and we don’t restrict who those people are by identity. Not by nationality, not by race, not by caste. We see the human solidarity as material solidarity’. 

I am constantly looking for these people, whether it be mutual aid networks, especially in Sudan who have done a lot of work to keep each other live because the so called humanitarian aid structures of Western nations and agencies has totally collapsed. The mutual aid networks that develop in these dire situations, I pay attention to that and those people inspire me a lot. They have soup kitchens and even mutual aid in the form of therapy for people who have experienced the kinds of traumas we can’t even fully grapple with. I am in community with several collectives who are doing work in Gaza while they themselves are trying to survive genocide and trying to keep themselves alive. Those people inspire me and are the places I look to for inspiration. I don’t look for inspiration in books, or ideologies, or theorists. I don’t look up to anyone because I think solidarity is a notion that is very anti-capitalist. It doesn’t do up and down, it is a lateral approach. I try not to look up to somebody, that’s a pathway to disappointment. 

So what I do is I seek praxis. I think most of all I am inspired by people who can practice their principles. There are so many. Long live the people who practice their principles. 

Dunyazad Project 

Emphasizing everything you said as my own perspective as well. These emotions are heavy, but yeah, glory to our martyrs, our elders, and everyone who has helped us envision a better world. 

I feel like we get lost in the sauce sometimes and we forget that we have each other to lean onto, hold onto, and to fight with and for. 

Everything is connected from our oppressions, to resistances, to our freedom and I think we shouldn’t lose side of that no matter how many distractions appear in front of us and admits us. 

On a final note, I wanted to end with your dedication in your book. 

For the diasporic who seek belonging and find liberations in unbelonging. Y’all keep our collective solidarities alive. 

My key takeaway was that the goal of feeling a sense of unbelonging and being diaspora-ish, isn’t assimilation. It’s not to become the arms and legs of violence or to diversify our systems of oppression so that we can be the ones in the ivory towers. It’s to move towards a world where we are all able to co-exist and we’re all existing as free people. 

I am honestly really excited about seeing lessons from this work becoming integrated into different settings from classrooms to everyday conversations. We’ve already been seeing this happen and it’s been beautiful to take a front seat in seeing this vision come to life and the impact it’s having. 

Dr. Gayatri Sethi

I am so thankful for us being comrades commited to co-learning and co-liberating and I am so grateful for this heart-opening conversation/interview that you’ve created space for. I really have every hope that that Dunyazad community will liberate collectively. Thank you for all the efforts that you seed into the world, including this project and thank you for including me in this. 

Dunyazad Project 

Of course,

Inquilab Zindabad 

ਇਨਕਲਾਬ ਜ਼ਿੰਦਾਬਾਦ

Dr. Gayatri Sethi

Inquilab Zindabad.

ਇਨਕਲਾਬ ਜ਼ਿੰਦਾਬਾਦ

That’s it.