Feb 11. (12pm) Sanjib Baruah (Bard College), In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (Stanford University Press, 2020) This critical and historical study of India’s troubled relations with this borderland region, shaped by the dynamics of a “frontier,” in its multiple references — migration and settlement, resource extraction, and regional geopolitics – provides nuanced account of this impossibly complicated story, asking how democracy can be sustained, and deepened, in these conditions. (Troubled National Territories) Discussants: Bodhisattva Kar, Nosheen Ali, Lydia Walter. In collaboration with South Asia at NYU. LINK TO MEETING. ………. RECORDING.

Feb 18. (4pm) Aisha Khan (NYU), The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2021). Spanning post-emancipation plantations in the West Indies and present-day England, North America, and Trinidad, this brilliant study focuses on the contested religious practices of obeah and Hosay, which have been racialized, respectively, as “African” and “Indian,” despite the diversity of their participants. Aisha Khan shows in detail how identities formed under colonialism continue to reiterate inequalities as well as reinforce demands for justice and recognition. (Afro-Asia in the Americas) Discussants: Lisa Lowe, Jacqueline N. Brown, Ifeona Fulani, Shobana Shankar. In collaboration with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS). LINK TO MEETING…………. RECORDING.

Feb 25. (12pm) Kasia Paprocki (LSE), Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh (Cornell University Press, 2021) A ground-breaking study of the politics of climate change adaptation, drawing on ethnographic and archival fieldwork, showing how Bangladeshi and global elites ignore the history of landscape transformation and its attendant political conflicts, as development dispossesses the poor from agrarian livelihoods, and outmigration from peasant communities leads to precarious existences in urban centers. (Global Bangladesh) Discussants: Dina Siddiqi, Naveeda Khan, Tariq Omar Ali. In collaboration with South Asia@NYU. LINK TO MEETING……RECORDING

Mar 4. (4pm)  Ismail Fajrie Alatas (NYU), What Is Religious Authority?: Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia (Princeton University Press, 2021). Taking readers from the eighteenth century to today, tracing the movements of Muslim saints and scholars from Yemen to Indonesia, this Anthropologist’s account of how Islamic religious authority is assembled through the unceasing labor of community building in Java shows how religious leaders unite diverse aspects of life and contest differing Muslim perspectives to create distinctly Muslim communities. (The Mobility of Religion) Discussants: Dale Eickelman, Anne Blackburn, Simon Coleman. Co-sponsored by the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, NYU Department of Religious Studies, and the NYU Center for Religion and Media.  LINK TO MEETING…. RECORDING

Mar 11. (10am) Shobana Shankar (Stony Brook), An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (Hurst Publishers, 2021) This groundbreaking intellectual history tackles the controversial question of how Africans and Indians make and unmake their differences. Drawing on archival and oral sources from seven countries, it traces how economic tensions surrounding the Indian diaspora in East and Southern Africa collided with widening Indian networks in West Africa and the Black Atlantic, forcing a racial reckoning over the course of the twentieth century.  Through cultural movements, including Pan-Africanism and popular devotionalism, Africans and Indians made race consciousness, alongside economic cooperation, a moral priority. Yet rising wealth and nationalist amnesia now threaten this postcolonial ethos. (Afro-Asia Interactions) Discussants: Renu Modi, Neelima Jeyachandran, and Meera Venkatachalam. In collaboration with the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora. LINK TO MEETING.  LINK TO RECORDING … YOUTUBE LINK

Apr 8. (4pm) Suchitra Vijayan (Polis Project), Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India (Penguin Random House, 2021). With a novelistic eye for detail, this stunning work of narrative reportage, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along India’s national borders, exposes a crisis of statelessness in India, which strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of people, especially those living in disputed border regions, where places a few miles apart can feel like entirely different countries. It is a call to action that brings us face to face with the brutal legacy of colonialism, state violence, and government corruption. (Troubled National Territories) Discussants: Julie Mostov, Hafsa Kanjwal. In collaboration with South Asia at NYU. LINK TO MEETING…..RECORDING

Apr 15. (12pm) Neelima Jeychandran (Penn State) A discussion of Verge: Studies in Global Asias 8.1 (Feb-Mar 2022), a special issue on “Indian Ocean Studies, Afro-Asian Affinities,” co-edited by Emmanuel Bruno Jean-Francois (Penn State) & Neelima Jeychandran (Penn State).  This special issue investigates how creative works and aesthetic expressions represent African-Asian affinities in several parts of the Indian Ocean world. Contributions featured in this issue engage with a wide array of objects and practices—including music and dance, poetry and novels, paintings and architectural designs—and consider how they simultaneously capture and shape the imaginary of the Indian Ocean as a space that generates complex definitions of transcultural, translocal, and transnational contacts. (Afro-Asian Interactions) Discussants: Prita Meier and Dilip Menon)  LINK TO MEETING…RECORDING

Apr 22. (12pm) Awam Amkpa  and Gunja Sengupta,  Sojourners, Sultans and ‘Slaves’: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire (University of California Press, forthcoming). In the 19th century, capitalism and empire networked the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds into a global public sphere of contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. This book mines multinational archives to illuminate the Atlantic reverberations of U.S. mercantile projects, “free labor” experiments, and slaveholding in western Indian Ocean societies. It profiles transnational human rights campaigns, shows how discourses of poverty, kinship, and care could be adapted to defend servitude in different parts of the world, and reveals the tenuous boundaries that such discourses shared with Whiggish contractual notions of freedom. An intercontinental cast of empire-builders and émigrés, slavers and reformers, a “cotton queen” and courtesans, and fugitive slaves and concubines offers windows to competing knowledge productions about “slavery in the East,” and prompts reflections on the comparative workings of subaltern agency. (Afro-Asian Interactions) Discussants:  Sarah Khan and Ahmad Sikainga. LINK TO MEETING.  Link to RECORDING

Apr 29 (4pm) Natasha Iskander (NYU). Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2021). An in-depth look at Qatar’s migrant workers and the place of skill in the language of control and power, in Qatar’s booming construction industry, in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup, showing how skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire, and revealing how skill functions as a marker of social difference powerful enough to structure all aspects of social and economic life. (The Global Gulf and Bangladesh). Discussants: Neha Vora and Rachel Sturman. Co-sponsored by the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.  LINK TO MEETING.  RECORDING