Voices Journal Volume 2023: 3-4

We are pleased and honored to introduce Rasel Ahmed, our Fall-Winter 2023 special issue editor. In early 2023, New York Folklore issued a Call for Proposals for guest editors and identified two talented emerging folklorists. Each proposed a specific theme or focus, with Rasel Ahmed’s issue focusing on folklore in a transnational context.

Folklore, not confined to boundaries of nationalism, homogeneity, and diversity, manifests across digital platforms, like TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook, shaping how people navigate in the virtual era. These platforms enable rapid dissemination of cultural expressions, transcending geographical and temporal boundaries. The shift challenges the approach to studying and defining folklore.

Shewly emerges as a compelling example, within a cohort of women in New York, who congregate and share experiences within their community, extending their interactions to a broader virtual community. ...Traditionally, the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren in Bangladesh and its diaspora enjoyed relative openness and freedom from censorship of male–female relationships. Criticisms directed at virtual activities, mainly by trolling, highlight anxieties surrounding the expansion of social ties into the virtual realm.

The Caribbean-themed mural was one of several culminating activities, which were developed and implemented through a NEA “Our Town” placemaking grant for 2023–2024. Conceived by Veena Chandra and Devesh Chandra, as a partnership with New York Folklore (NYF), the intent of the project was to recognize the connections of North Indian classical traditions with the Guyanese community in Schenectady.

There is a long-standing association between phenology and traditional foodways. Arguably, all phenology is connected to foodways, in that whether hunting, fishing, foraging, propagating, and/or cultivating food, all food based in the landscape is inextricably connected to natural processes, ecological conditions, and seasonal cycles—whether or not they are explicitly and obviously food-related.

Fairy tales have been retold, rewritten, and reproduced across media for centuries. Although traditionally, fairy tales have championed reproductive future by celebrating the heteronormative “happily ever-after,” indicated by the union between heterosexual couples, Queer rewritings of fairy tales and scholarship on this matter are not completely scarce in the West. There is, however, a dearth of Queer fairy tales for the Desi audience, and naturally, therefore, limited scholarship available on the matter....The absence of Queer fairy tales in traditional Indian folklore keeps Queerness invisible in the cognitive landscape of children while perpetuating heteronormativity. .

Like so many ancient crafts, handspinning is far from dead and gone, and there’s a vibrant international community of spinners with their own literature, events, and makers of new tools. Still, the old wheels are constantly at risk, as collectors pass away, institutions shut down and disperse their collections, and time and circumstances take their toll through water damage, fires, woodworms, pet damage, and lost parts. Collectors and users of old spinning wheels are a fraction of the larger handspinning community, so there are only so many homes for these grand old tools, and each spinner can only take in so many spinning wheels.

The first prahara is spent in ploughing, The second in harrowing. Then you strike me with a stick— Have you forgotten your Lord, Oh dear farmer? I owe you nothing at all, I graze on the wild grass!...

South Asian regional cinema has consistently served as a medium for exploring the multifaceted nature of identity and complex social structure. Currently, amid the newly emerging film genres, a subgenre of horror, featuring supernatural entities, illuminates the role of religious belief and narratives in shaping South Asian worldviews. The emergence of such films topples the East/West dichotomies, by bringing to the forefront the dynamics between the regional/vernacular and the dominant/mainstream within the Indian context. Therefore, this study proposes an appendage of intersectionality to subalternity, arriving at the framework of intersectional subalternity, manifesting at the level of ideas and ideologies to study the movement from the periphery to the center in the South Asian cinematic genre.

(1) Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID offers a profound reminder that the pandemic was not merely a medical or logistical crisis but also a deeply cultural one. The book underscores how communities adapted, coped, and ultimately persevered through vernacular creativity and collective resilience in a social way. (2) Anna Morcom’s Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Culture of Exclusions (2014) explores the profound cultural shifts that occurred with the advent of British colonialism in India, particularly, focusing on the hereditary female dancers—once the most esteemed artists in precolonial India. With the onset of colonization, their status shifted drastically.