"Do You Love Me? A Transnational Memoir"

Thursday, April 4, 5:00pm,  Barker 133

When Rani Neutill receives a disturbing message from her cousin, urging her to travel to India to save her estranged, elderly mother from physical decline and bring her to the US, Rani’s hard-won, stable life in Boston, MA is upended. For decades, Rani and her mother have been playing a painful game of emotional tug-of-war. Before it’s too late, Rani must reckon with centuries of inherited trauma if she is to understand the trajectory of her own life (and her mother’s) and decide whether she wishes to summon the power of forgiveness. Spanning more than three decades and two generations of mother/daughter dynamics, Do You Love Me travels between Pasadena, California and Kolkata, India, charting Rani’s journey to build a cultural map for herself and to answer questions that have cast a long shadow over her coming of age.

What does it mean to be a biracial woman straddling the border between two seemingly incompatible identities? Will she ever truly understand her ancestors and their trauma, or will she always be kept at a remove? What—and where—is “home?”

Bio: Rani Neutill is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and has taught ethnic American and postcolonial literature at Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins University and other institutions. She currently teaches classes in creative writing and Asian American literature at MIT, Tufts University, and Emerson College. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Al Jazeera English, CNN, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Post and The Rumpus amongst other publications. Neutill co-edited an anthology about the Kpop group BTS titled Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader, forthcoming from Duke University Press.

About this Series:  The 2023-2024 New Directions in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality seminar series is a forum for discussing new interdisciplinary scholarship in the field of women, gender, and sexuality studies. This year's series focuses on Art & Politics in the Asian Diaspora. Featured talks speak to multiple academic disciplines, methods, and traditions while forging an engaged and vibrant intellectual community.

The series is a partnership between the Mahindra Humanities Center, and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard. It is co-convened by Jung Ja Choi, (Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality), and Linda Schlossberg, (Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies).