A new exhibit at the Knockdown Center in Queens explores the little-known history of Bengali people who migrated from South Asia in the early 20th century and passed as black Americans. Pigeonhole: The Life and Work of Bobby Alam paints a multidisciplinary portrait of a fictional Bengali jazz musician created as a composite character by artistic collaborators and husband-and-wife team Priyanka Dasgupta and Chad Marshall.

"We started to think a lot about why these histories are fragmented, and who is remembered and who is not, and what it means to tell stories of these marginalized histories and how important it is to make them visible,"  Dasgupta told WNYC's cultural critic Rebecca Carroll. "But at the same time we didn't want to impose details onto a life that was lived, but was also remembered in fragments. And so we created this composite to point at this history."   

In American history, the term "passing" is most often associated with light-skinned black Americans who passed as white in an effort to escape the violence of racism and slavery and the Jim Crow South. In "Pigeonhole," the experience is used to illustrate survival in the face of anti-Asian immigration laws. Marshall, who is black, said that he and Dasgupta were mindful of this as they were thinking about how to launch the exhibit.

"In both instances, you have someone trying to pass as part of a group that has more privilege," he said. "A jazz musician would have a certain amount of freedom in that time period to travel and interact, and not necessarily be as restricted as a black person." 

The idea of privilege in this context is complicated, Dasgupta explained. "These are also basic rights. The right to privilege is the right to have the same amount of access and the same amount of opportunity. Why should we be okay with less?" 

Given the weight of race in America, Marshall emphasized that the intention behind "Pigeonhole" is not to diminish the impact of black passing throughout history or the perpetuation of stereotypes. "We don't want it to seem like he's some sort of minstrel type of character, where he's just putting on blackface," he said. "These Bengalis were not passing as black within the black community. Within the black community they were understood as Indians — and embraced for adding to that culture." 

Pigeonhole: The Life and Work of Bobby Alam is at the Knockdown Center in Queens June 29 through August 18.