Shreyas R. Krishnan
Assistant Professor
Washington University in St. Louis
In the 1970s and 80s, racial solidarity among African, Caribbean, and Asian immigrants in Britain was based on a shared history of colonial oppression. British South Asians — women and queer people in particular — found that a focus on cultural identity became necessary to identify and dismantle the specific kinds of structural violence they faced from within their communities. To organize themselves in the 1980s and 90s, South Asian women and queer groups produced periodicals, leaflets, and flyers to reach and engage their peers in the UK, USA, Canada, and South Asia.
Through culturally-specific illustrations of identity, struggles, and liberation, these printed materials helped visualize feminist and queer ‘South Asian-ness’, and contributed to creating domestic and cross-continental networks of care and advocacy for women and queer South Asians.
This research draws from a wide range of primary sources: leaflets, flyers, posters, council meeting records, and periodicals, including the feminist magazine ‘Mukti’ (published by Mukti Collective) and the queer newsletter ‘Shakti Khabar’ (published by Shakti, a South Asian lesbian and gay network). Situated across archives and special collections in London, UK, all of the material studied was produced either by or for South Asian groups between the 1980s and 90s. In this presentation, I will share a preliminary taxonomy for these illustrations to explore how they signalled cultural identity to women and queer South Asians. Through tracking recurring motifs, I will also examine how these illustrations of ‘South Asian-ness’ indicated either broader racial and queer solidarity or South Asian-specific solidarity.
This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 12.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 26, 2026.
