Art as Resistance and Resilience with Dr. Asma Sayed

Art as Resistance and Resilience: The Contributions of South Asian Artists in Canada (Asian Heritage Month 2025) Literature, film, visual art, music, new media and other modes of cultural production are interwoven modes of storytelling through which human life and people’s desires and hopes for a better world can be understood. For more than a century, many South Asian artists have used their art as counter-narratives to colonial and Eurocentric discourses to foster fairness and empathy in Canadian society. In this presentation, through a reading of contemporary South Asian literary and cultural texts, Dr. Asma Sayed will examine how artists forward social justice and human rights discourse, as a conscious or unconscious intent, through their creative output. Using an intersectional social justice and decolonial framework, she will look at how we can critically interpret creative expressions as sites of socio-political change, activism, empowerment, and community-building.