Priyanka Dasgupta & Chad Marshall

The Silk & Spice Tour ; Welcome Stranger

The works presented here are selections from the artists’ archive, capturing the life and times of Bahauddin (Bobby) Alam. Alam was a Bengali lascar who immigrated to the United States in 1918 and gained fame as a Black Jazz musician. He is representative of the larger historical movement of Bengalis who mixed and married into Black communities, passing as Black to get around US Immigration Laws that barred Asians. These laws extended from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1885 until the end of the second World War. The images comprise concert posters from Alam’s Silk & Spice Tour, his musical world tour that re-traces the initial route Alam traveled, working on British Merchant Naval ships to migrate from Calcutta to New York City. The video, Welcome Stranger, combines found footage and home movies from Alam’s archive to visualize his journey into the United States, through Ellis island.

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