All posts by David Ludden

“A Peasant Millennium: David Ludden and the History of South Asia”

Colloquium, Conferences
Please RSVP at the following: RSVP form
                                                                  

THE PROGRAM

10:30 – 11:00 – Welcome, Bagels/Coffee
11:00 – 11:15 – Introduction (Meghna Chaudhuri and Matt Shutzer)

11:15 – 12:30 – Roundtable 1

Manan Ahmed: “What Did W. Norman Brown Do?”
Gyan Prakash: “Agrarian Studies and Subaltern Studies”
Willem van Schendel: ” Spatial History, Borders, and ‘Nature’s Social Geography'”

12:30 – 1:30 – Lunch

1:45 – 2:30 – Keynote 1

In Conversation: Beshara Doumani and David Ludden
Global Frames: Imperialism, Inequality & the Politics of Knowledge

2:45 – 4:15 – Roundtable 2

Johan Mathew: “From Development Regimes to Mobile Capital: New Histories of Capitalism in the Wake of David Ludden”
Prasannan Parthasarathi: “Agriculture and Environment in Nineteenth-Century Tamil Nadu”                                                                                                                        Andrew Sartori: “Currency, Commerce and the State: Cowry Country Revisited?”                                                                                                                              

4:15 – 4:30 – Break

4:30 – 5:15 – Keynote 2

                       Sanjay Subrahmanyam: “The Annales School and Indian History:                                                                                   The View from Tirunelveli”

Closing Remarks: David Ludden

Reception at Vol de Nuit (148 West 4th Street, nr. 6th Ave)

19 April New York Chinatown

Colloquium
GLOBAL ASIA COLLOQUIUM
April 19, 2024. 4-7PM
in 53 Washington Square South (KJCC)  room 701

Food Justice and Urban Change in a Historic Chinese Neighborhood

Valerie Imbruce

Food justice includes the right to food that is culturally appropriate. That right is challenged in immigrant neighborhoods where the participants and spaces of food production, distribution, and consumption are contested. Manhattan’s Chinatown is a prime example of a neighborhood where food is central to its commerce, cultural heritage, and reputation as a tourist destination, yet the number of food distributors, restaurants, and street vendors in this historically low-income community have been declining due to gentrification, xenophobia, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. How do people who make a livelihood through Chinatown’s food system navigate change? Who is advocating for food businesses in Chinatown and what are their goals? The grassroots response to this crisis is a reminder that people have the power to use food to assert the society that they desire, to shape a highly contested urban space, and to claim their right to the city. In this discussion I’d like to consider how the dynamics of cultural and community identity within this neighborhood’s food system have relevance beyond Chinatown and can expand our view of food justice.

Valerie Imbruce is the Director of the Center for Environment and Society and affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and Archeology at Washington College. She is a facilitative leader who takes a collaborative, transdisciplinary approach to research, education, and community engagement. She is the author of From Farm to Canal Street: Chinatown’s Alternative Food Network in the Global Marketplace. A recent essay and first contribution to a cookbook can be found alongside delicious photos and recipes in Made Here, proceeds from which support Send Chinatown Love’s community building efforts. Her research interests include sustainable food systems, interdisciplinary undergraduate education, and more recently research identity. Imbruce received her PhD from the City University of New York Graduate Center and the New York Botanical Garden.

29 March Beshara Doumani

Uncategorized
GLOBAL ASIA COLLOQUIUM 

29 MARCH 2024. 4-7PM . 53 Washington Square South (KJCC) 701.

Rebuilding From the Rubble, Yet Again:

Palestinian Futures After October 7

Beshara Doumani, Professor of History and the Mahmoud Darwish Chair for Palestinian Studies at Brown University.

Registration required for in-person attendance: REGISTER HERE 

To attend on zoom, REGISTER HERE.  

ABSTRACT: The Hamas attack on October 7. 2024 was planned and intended as a rupture that puts an end to the Oslo phase of Palestinian national politics; a phase experienced by most Palestinians as a slow death by a thousand cuts. The attack was directed against an external enemy, but it aimed, primarily, at transforming the Palestinian body politic and future modes of collective action. The ongoing genocide/domicide perpetrated by the Israeli government is directed at the people of Gaza, but it aims to secure the permanent annexation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank and, more important, to facilitate the establishment of an overwhelming Jewish majority between the river and the sea. As they rebuild from the rubble, yet again, Palestinians must grapple with the three fundamental questions they have faced for over a century: Who are we? What do we want? And how do we go about achieving our goals? 

Beshara Doumani is Professor of History and the Mahmoud Darwish Chair for Palestinian Studies at Brown University. His research focuses on communities, places, and time periods marginalized by mainstream scholarship on the early modern and modern Middle East. He also writes on academic freedom, the politics and ethics of knowledge production, and the Palestinian condition. His books include Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, and Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History.

Doumani is the former President of Birzeit University in Palestine. He is the founding director of Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies, and of the New Directions in Palestinian Studies Research Initiative. From 2008-2011 he led a team that produced the strategic plan for the establishment of the Palestinian Museum. He is currently serving as the co-editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly and working on a modern history of the Palestinians through the social life of stone.

Himalayan Lives Between Nepal and New York

Uncategorized
GLOBAL ASIA COLLOQUIUM 
April 5, 2024. 4-7PM
in 53 Washington Square South (KJCC) 701

Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York

Sienna R. Craig is the Orvil Dryfoos Professor of Public Affairs in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College

Abstract:  For centuries, people from the Nepal Himalaya have relied on a combination of agriculture, pastoralism, and trade as a way of life. Among some communities, seasonal migrations to Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, and cities in North India for trade as well as temporary wage labor abroad to other Asian countries and the Gulf States shaped their experiences since the 1980s. Yet, permanent migrations to New York City over the past two decades, are reshaping lives and social worlds. Culturally Tibetan regions such as Mustang have experienced one of the highest rates of depopulation in contemporary Nepal — a profoundly visible depopulation that contrasts with the relative invisibility of Himalayan migrants in New York City. Drawing on more than 25 years of fieldwork and relationships with people in and from Mustang, and on collaborative NYC-based research focused on the broader migration experiences of Himalayan and Tibetan New Yorkers, this talk explores questions about migration, community, and belonging in translocal worlds — rooted equally and by turns in Himalayan villages and the global village of New York. I explore how different generations abide with and understand each other, how traditions are defended and transformed in the context of new mobilities, and how cycles of movement and patterns of world-making shed light on dynamics of kinship and care in an era of migration. flexible in the face of migration, at the nexus of environmental, economic, and cultural transformation.

Sienna R. Craig is the Orvil Dryfoos Professor of Public Affairs in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She is a medical and cultural anthropologist whose relationships with Himalayan and Tibetan communities spans three decades and bridges communities in Asia and North America. She received her PhD from Cornell University (2006). Craig is the author of The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives Between Nepal and New York (University of Washington Press, 2020),  Mustang in Black and White, with photographer Kevin Bubriski (Vajra Publications, 2018), Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (University of California Press, 2012) and Horses Like Lightning: A Story of Passage through the Himalayas (Wisdom Publications,2008). She is the co-editor of Medicine Between Science and Religion: Explorations on Tibetan Grounds (Berghahn Books, 2010), and Studies of Medical Pluralism in Tibetan History and Society (IITBS, 2010), among other publications. Craig enjoys writing across genres and has published poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and children’s literature in addition to scholarly works. Her children’s book, Clear Sky, Red Earth: A Himalayan Story, featuring artist Tenzin Norbu’s paintings, is in its third edition (Mera Publications, 2018) in English and has also been published in Tibetan (TALI, 2011).  Craig has collaborated with composer Andrea Clearfield, writing libretto for original works, including those that reflect Tibetan and Himalayan culture, Tse Go La and Khandroma. Craig’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, among other sources. From 2012-2017 she served as co-editor of HIMALAYA, Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, and she is an Executive Council member of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM). Since 2018, Craig has served as the House Professor for South House, one of Dartmouth’s six residential education communities.

 

Visualizing African-Asian Worlds

Conferences

HERE are links to the NYUAD webpage and the Final Agenda 

Agenda (tentative draft)

Saturday, March 2                                       

09:00                            Breakfast at Torch Club

10:00                            Welcoming Remarks              

David Ludden, Professor of Political Economy and Globalization,  Department of History, NYU.

Shobana Shankar, Associate Professor of History, Stony Brook University

Awam Amkpa, Dean of Arts and Humanities, NYUAD  

10:30                            Labor and Work David Ludden, Discussant

             Ningyi Sun and Pascale Appora-Gnekindy – Film Screening Eat Bitter (2023)

12:00                            Coffee Break

12:15                             Imaginaries: Arhin Acheampong, Discussant

Che Onejoon – Mansudae Master Class (2021)

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan – Desiring Bollywood (Unreleased)

13:30                            Lunch at Torch Club

15:00                             Gallery Tour – Textiles across Continents, Humanities Building

15:15                             Short Talk – Malika Kraamer and Pashington Obeng

16:00 – 20:00                  Free time

20:00                            Dinner at Torch Club (Optional – Please RSVP to nyuad.humanities.fellowships@nyu.edu

Sunday, March 3, 2024

09:00                            Breakfast at Torch Club

10:00                            Histories: Shobana Shankar, Discussant

Amshu Chukki – Dispatches (2022)

Mansour Sora Wade – Dakar-Bombay (2010, Uncut)

11:00                             Closing Discussion

South Asia New York

Colloquium
GLOBAL ASIA COLLOQUIUM 
MARCH  8, 2024. 4-7PM
in 53 Washington Square South (KJCC) 701

Sangay Mishra

South Asian American Diaspora:

Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization

Abstract: 

Asian Americans of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other  South Asian ancestry are dramatically challenging the  traditional mainstream view of who counts as Asian American. With their increasingly visible presence among Asian Americans, South Asians have started shaping the contours of Asian American politics and political mobilization in important ways. An important feature of South Asian American mobilization has been the presence of deep internal fractures within the community along the lines of religion, caste, class, and nation of origin among other things.These internal cleavages have a strong diasporic dimension and they have shaped the nature of community mobilizations in the post-9/11 period. At the same time, South Asians have been showing a relatively high level of uniformity in the context of  American electoral politics in terms of their political preferences that are possibly shaped by how South Asians encounter and interpret race and racialization. It is important to underline these  contradictory political impulses within South Asian communities to speculate about their future political trajectories as a diasporic community within the larger umbrella category of  Asian American.

Sangay K Mishra is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Drew University. He specializes in immigrant political incorporation, transnationalism, diaspora, and racial and ethnic politics. His work engages with political participation of South Asian immigrants in the United States as well as countries of origin with a particular focus on immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. He has also been analyzing the experiences of Muslim American communities with law enforcement agencies. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He served as the co-chair of Asian and Pacific American Caucus of the American Political Science Association from 2014-2016. He also served as the chair of the Committee on the Status of Asian Pacific American of the Western Political Science Association.

His book, titled Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2016 and Sage India in 2017. The book was awarded the best book on Asian America (2017) by the American Sociological Association’s section on Asia and Asian America. His current project looks at U.S.-born South Asians and the ways in which they engage with people of color identity.

Afroasian Music

Uncategorized

Global Asia Colloquium

May 10, 2024

4-7pm, 53 Washington Square South, Room 701

Sumangala Damodaran

Afroasian Musical Imaginaries – Precolonial Imprints in Contemporary Musics

Abstract: There is now a large and burgeoning scholarship around precolonial AfroAsian connections and how such long term links have impacted how societies have emerged and the resultant cultural formations within them. If we turn to music and associated performance forms, similarities and various traces of such longue duree interactions can be observed that allow us to uncover historical connections between parts of the two continents in ways that have not been pointed out before. The talk will present examples of such musical forms and traditions along long-term migratory routes and also point out the role of historical memory and emotional registers in the
performance of such musics on the two continents. I will also discuss methodological issues that arise and need to be pushed in undertaking such an exercise.  

Bio: Sumangala Damodaran is an academician and musician, whose experience spans teaching and research in Economics, Development Studies and Popular Music Studies. She has taught in Delhi University and Ambedkar University Delhi in India over a period of three decades and is presently Director, Gender and Economics with the International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs) and Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Washington at Seattle. Apart from her academic involvements as an economist and social scientist, she is also a singer and composer. Her archiving and documentation of the musical tradition of the Indian People’s Theatre Association from the 1940s and 1950s has resulted in a book titled “The Radical Impulse: Music in the Tradition of the IPTA” and an album titled ‘Songs of Protest’ and  she has performed from the documented repertoire extensively in different parts of the world. She has collaborated with poets and musicians from South Africa as a founder member of the award-winning Insurrections Ensemble, which has produced six music albums and has also directed a multi-institutional project around Music and Migration in Precolonial Afro-Asia from 2016 until the present, which has resulted in two musical productions and a book titled ‘Maps of Sorrow’(2023).