Faculty Interview Dr. Kumi Silva

By: Prabisha Shrestha

Dr. Kumi Silva is an Associate Professor in the UNC’s Department of Communications. Dr. Silva’s research is at the intersection of identity, politics, post-colonial studies, cultural studies, and popular culture. She is the author of Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and co-editor of Feminist Erasures: Challenging Backlash Culture (Palgrave UK, 2015) and Migration, Identity, and Belonging: Defining Borders and Boundaries of the Homeland (Routledge 2020). Her current research extends the exploration of identification in Brown Threat to understanding how affective relationships, especially calls to and of love, animate regulatory practices that are deeply cruel and alienating.

Where is home for you and what makes it a home for you?

I’ve lived in Durham, NC for the last 8-years, and it’s the place I’ve lived the longest since I was 16, so definitely Durham feels like home!  But home is never a simple question for an immigrant, so home is also where I was born, which is Sri Lanka.  My dad and sister still live there, so I think of it as home in terms of roots and I try to visit as often as I can.  

In what ways has UNC’s Department of Communication changed since you started working at the University? 

When I joined the department in 2011, I was in awe of the scholars, artists, performers, and teachers that my colleagues are. We’ve continued to add more amazing people to our faculty since then. The department is amongst the very best in the country and is unique in its approach to the field of communication because of its twin commitment to critical theory and social justice across teaching, research, and service. I think those commitments have become even stronger over the last several years.   

What prompted you to write “Brown Threat - Identification in the Security State” and how has the book been received?

 I was a graduate student working on my dissertation when 9/11 happened.  While the dissertation was on a completely different topic, I started keeping an archive of sorts—incidents, notes, media representations—about the ways that race and racism was being produced under those conditions, just because it seemed relevant and significant.  Once I finished my Ph.D., I started to think more seriously about how this archive presented an interesting picture of how identifications and politics in the United States produced race.  It took me about three more years to actually seriously start writing about it.  I’ve had lots of really engaging and interesting conversations with people I couldn’t have had without the book, and I’m really grateful for those conversations—even the people who disagree with my arguments and observations!

In what ways does the U.S. continue to charge the Brown identity with imperialist notions today?

I’m not sure I can answer the question in a few words, but let me try! I think that United States is not much different in its colonial relationship to South Asia than the British empire was. But, because of global capitalism, and the ways that politics and economics have merged over the last 3-4 decades, the imperialist, extractive practices are more opaque unless you’re really invested in uncovering them or critiquing them. In my own work, I’ve made the argument that the United States welcomes the goods, services, and expertise that are produced in the global south, and are also happy to consume brown bodies as commodities, especially through media, but are less enthusiastic about the physical brown body crossing borders into the country.  

How can Brown people exert agency over their stories and how their identities are perceived in the 21st century U.S.?

Brown, in a racialized sense, is such a broad category, and one way to make that diversity visible is to make space for each other to share those diverse stories. We aren’t a monolith and in spite of the way consumer culture represents us. In reality, our geographies, cultures, communities, and perhaps even our priorities, are different.  And there is so much strength and possibility in that diversity. I think it’s important to embrace that, and create stories that are layered, diverse, and complex rather than representing a part as the whole.     

What role do you think South Asian organizations in the U.S. and at UNC can play in forging a sense of belonging and community building?

Like I mentioned earlier, creating connections based on geographic affinity but not enforced homogeneity is important. Also, recognizing that we have connections to communities outside the South Asian context, and forging those bonds to build community on a broader scale, I think, is also very important. South Asian immigrants have historically been somewhat timid about joining civil rights movements and other social justice movements, like the LGBTQ movement, but so many of us are able to have relatively decent lives in this country because of those who fought for those rights, and I think it is important that we—along with community building amongst ourselves—also build community with other historically marginalized groups both in the US and at UNC. 

Since the publication of “Feminist Erasures: Challenging Backlash Culture”, how visible and intersectional do you think feminism has been in contemporary Western culture, particularly in media? 

Feminist Erasures was published in 2015, and I think we’ve seen an astounding erosion in women’s rights, especially reproductive rights, since then.  I think the reasons are obvious. Certainly the mediated representations of empowered women continue to grow, so there is considerable cognitive dissonance between what we see in the media and the reality of women’s rights today in the United States. 

How do you think student activists can use a post-colonial lens to inform their activism and how they move about this world?

Recognizing that essentialized identities, especially those corresponding to geographies, are created as means of control and are meant to foreclose connections amongst broader groups of subordinate subjects, is perhaps the best use of a postcolonial lens from a student activist perspective. The stronger our connections are to other marginalized communities, the stronger our activism and impact can be. While certainly the vectors of oppression—and the causes we fight for and against—can be and often are, quite different, there is so much value in defying the preordained borders that we are expected to fight within. Showing up for and supporting someone else’s struggles means that you are also educating yourself on how to fight for your own rights. Many anti-colonial movements relied on each other for guidance and strategies. Following independence from the colonial yoke, global alliances resulted in the Non-aligned Movement demonstrating (albeit, briefly) the value of global community building. Recognizing shared oppressions, and consistently showing up for each other is perhaps the most valuable thing we can learn from these movement and critical lenses.   

Prabisha Shrestha is a graduate student student at UNC-Chapel Hill on Monsoon’s content creation and web design team. She loves hiking and being outdoors. She also enjoys learning about new cultures and languages.