Gayatri Sethi
Gayatri Sethi is a cultural worker, educator and caregiver. She is connected to multiple diaspora communities in (South) Asia, Africa and the Americas. With heritage roots in pre-partition Punjab, she was born in Shinyanga, Tanzania and raised in Gaborone, Botswana. She identifies as polycultural, multilingual and interfaith.
Her lifelong learning work focuses on unlearning allegiance to systems of oppression rooted in imperialism while relearning about liberation movements, anti-imperialism, abolition, and revolutions. She resides in sacred Muscogee lands and seeks to seed solidarity with movements for land back globally, from Punjab to Palestine.
Books by Gayatri
A collective learning resource that offers inquiries about diasporic identity and belonging aimed at practicing global solidarity.
What does it mean to be in diaspora? How do our identities and aspirations for belonging unfold during times of collective upheaval?
Reviews
“Sethi’s sharp gaze pierces America’s model minority myth and white-adjacent behaviors. She sees and names the immigrant’s invisibility and othering and describes universities as places of “compliance, not liberation.” . . . tackles thorny issues of anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and white allyship that are often swept under the carpet.”
“. . . the unconventional combination of free verse, journal entries, and workbook activities supports active engagement . . . This learning resource is best read and reflected on in small doses.” – Kirkus Reviews
“Sethi analyzes, through discussions of geography, history, and cultural practice, diasporic “ways” as epistemologies – modes of knowing and surviving shaped by displacement and resistance… The text’s greatest strength lies in its insistence that ambiguity and partial belonging are not deficits but critical resources… a valuable contribution to diaspora studies, ethnic studies, and feminist cultural theory…” –School Library Journal
Where do those relegated to the margins find belonging?
In her luminous debut Unbelonging, Gayatri Sethi deftly interweaves verse, memoir, and a bold call to action as she recounts her experience searching for home in the diaspora.
Drawing upon her life story as a Tanzanian-born-Punjabi turned American educator and mother of biracial children, Sethi tells an intimate tale of stepping into her power while confronting misogyny, racism, and empire.
