South Asia Seminar Series

Dr. Huzaifa Omair Siddiqi will offer an analysis of Friedrich Nietzsche and Mansur Ibn Husain al-Hallaj in Iqbal’s Javednama.

Francesca Orsini will talk about how we can reassemble the languages and oral and written textual traditions that colonial ideas of language and modern literary histories have separated.

Sumangala Damodaran will talk about how a corpus of music from mid-1980s India onwards come to address and re-constellate questions of nation, identity and politics in a refreshing manner, challenging right-wing cultural assertions frontally, and also shaping popular music listening cultures in the country through providing contemporary interpretations. 

SherAli Tareen will talk about his recently published book Perilous Intimacies on how leading South Asian Muslim thinkers imagined and contested the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendship from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.

Forthcoming

The speaker will present an outline of his current book project. (Event co-sponsored by The Islamic Studies Program & The Institute for Global Studies)

Niharika Yadav will examine the politics of language in Rammanohar Lohia's socialism through an account of his Angrezī Hatāo (Banish English) movement. 

Event co-sponsored by the Institute for Global Studies.

Prathama Banerjee will explore the politics of time implicit in the career of the Subaltern Studies school of thought. (Event co-sponsored by Institute of Global Studies.)

This paper is based on Chowdhury's current book project that contemplates the postcolonial trajectories of development and democracy. The focus is a river bridge in Bangladesh which is the country’s largest and most high-profile development project. 

In this talk, Dr. Dhanda argues that South Asian populations experience the relative intensity of racism and casteism in different ways and presents that from our position in the diaspora, the concurrence of anti-racism and anti-casteism lies in the realm of praxis.

Anand Patwardhan is an Indian documentary filmmaker known for his socio-political, human rights-oriented films. Some of his films explore the rise of religious fundamentalism, sectarianism and casteism in India, while others investigate nuclear nationalism and unsustainable development.