Sep 22. 4-7pm. Book Launch

Hafsa Kanjwal, Colonizing Kashmir: State-building under Indian Occupation, Stanford University Press, 2023.

53 Wash Sq South (King Juan Carlos Center), Room 701 

The Indian government, touted as the world’s largest democracy, often repeats that Jammu and Kashmir—its only Muslim-majority state—is “an integral part of India.” The region, which is disputed between India and Pakistan, and is considered the world’s most militarized zone, has been occupied by India for over seventy-five years. In this book, Hafsa Kanjwal interrogates how Kashmir was made “integral” to India through a study of the decade long rule (1953-1963) of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the second Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Drawing upon a wide array of bureaucratic documents, propaganda materials, memoirs, literary sources, and oral interviews in English, Urdu, and Kashmiri, Kanjwal examines the intentions, tensions, and unintended consequences of Bakshi’s state-building policies in the context of India’s colonial occupation. She reveals how the Kashmir government tailored its policies to integrate Kashmir’s Muslims while also showing how these policies were marked by inter-religious tension, corruption, and political repression.

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Hafsa Kanjwal is an assistant professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World. As a historian of modern Kashmir, she is the author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023), which examines how the Indian and Kashmir governments utilized state-building to entrench India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir in the aftermath of Partition. Colonizing Kashmir historicizes India’s occupation of Kashmir through processes of emotional integration, development, normalization, and empowerment to highlight the new hierarchies of power and domination that emerged in the aftermath of decolonization. Hafsa has written and spoken on her research for a variety of news outlets including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, and the BBC. She received her Ph.D. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan and a Bachelors in Regional Studies of the Muslim World from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Saadia Toor is Associate Professor of Sociology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She has a long history of work within progressive political organizations and groups in Pakistan such as the Women’s Action Forum and the Mazdoor Kissan Party. Dr. Toor’s scholarship revolves around issues of culture, nationalism, gender/sexuality, state formation, and international political economy. A special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly on the theme of Solidarity co-edited by Dr Toor was published in November 2014.  Among her publications are The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan (Pluto Press, 2011), and articles in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Cultural Dynamics, and Child Labor World Atlas: A Reference Encyclopedia, among other venues.

David Ludden is Professor of Political Economy and Globalization in the Department of History at New York University. Ludden has directed South Asia programs at Penn, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Senior Scholars program (CIES), the South Asia programs at the Social Science Research Council, and NYU. He has served as President of the Association for Asian Studies and Chair of the NYU Department of History. He has published three monographs on South Asian History and dozens of peer reviewed articles and chapters, and also edited four scholarly volumes and translated a collection of ancient Tamil poems. The breadth of his scholarship includes serious studies of ancient, medieval, and early-modern history, as well as deep research into modern history and contemporary economic and social development.

Dina M. Siddiqi is Clinical Associate Professor in the School of Liberal Studies at New York University. Her research, grounded in the study of Bangladesh, joins development studies, transnational feminist theory, and the anthropology of Islam and human rights. She has published extensively on the global garment industry, non-state gender justice systems, and the cultural politics of Islam and nationalism in Bangladesh. Professor Siddiqi is a member of the New York University Society of Fellows, on the advisory board of Dialectical Anthropology, and on the editorial board of Routledge’s Women in Asia Publication Series. She is on the Executive Committee of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS), and an Advisory Council member of the South Asian feminist network, Sangat. She is currently engaged in a project on economic development, discourses of empowerment and the travels of civilizational feminisms. 

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Join The New York Center for Global Asia for a screening of the award-winning film, The Ice Cream Sellers (2021), followed by a discussion with the director Sohel Rahman, moderated by Dina M. Siddiqi (Liberal Studies, NYU).

Time and Date: 4-7PM, April 28th, 2023
Location: New York University, King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, 53 Washington Square South, Room 701

Sohel Rahman is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and producer based in Lisbon, Portugal. His films have been screened internationally in various film festivals and universities around the world. Sohel teaches film in different universities and institutes around the world as an invited filmmaker. He is the director and chief organizer of Mostra DE Cinema Saul Asiatico, Lisbon, Portugal,

Dina M. Siddiqi is Clinical Associate Professor in the School of Liberal Studies at New York University. Her research, grounded in the study of Bangladesh, joins development studies, transnational feminist theory, and the anthropology of Islam and human rights. She has published extensively on the global garment industry, non-state gender justice systems, and the cultural politics of Islam and nationalism in Bangladesh. She is currently engaged in a project on economic development, discourses of empowerment and the travels of civilizational feminisms. Professor Siddiqi is a member of the New York University Society of Fellows, on the advisory board of Dialectical Anthropology, and on the editorial board of Routledge’s Women in Asia Publication Series. 

Register for the In Person Event Here

Join Global Bangladesh 10AM EST, May 12th 2023 on Zoom for Naveeda Khan’s new book, River Life and the Upspring of Nature (2023, Duke University Press).

In River Life and the Upspring of Nature, Naveeda Khan examines the relationship between nature and culture through the study of the everyday existence of chauras, the people who live on the chars (sandbars) within the Jamuna River in Bangladesh. Nature is a primary force at play within this existence as chauras live itinerantly and in flux with the ever-changing river flows. By showing how the alluvial flood plains configure chaura life, Khan shows how nature can both give rise to and inhabit social, political, and spiritual forms of life.

Here is the RECORDNG

Naveeda Khan is associate professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, where she also sits on the board of the Center for Islamic Studies and serves as affiliate faculty for the Undergraduate Program in Environmental Science and Studies. Her research spans riverine lives and national climate policy in Bangladesh, UN led global climate governance processes, German romanticism, Bengali and Urdu literature and writings on the environment. She is the author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Duke University Press, 2012) River Life and the Upspring of Nature (Duke University Press, 2023) and In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South (Fordham University Press, 2023) and editor of Beyond Crisis: Reevaluating Pakistan (Routledge, 2010). Besides these, Naveeda has published articles and book chapters in various disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals and edited volumes and has edited several special issues of journals such as Anthropology and Humanism, Anthropological Theory, Contributions to Indian Sociology. She is working on two manuscripts “Householding in the Time of Climate Change” and “Schelling and the Romantic Method.” She is unclear what she will be working on next.

Dina Mahnaz Siddiqi is Clinical Associate Professor of Liberal Studies at New York University. Her research is grounded in the study of Bangladesh and joins development studies, transnational feminist theory, and the anthropology of Islam and human rights. She has published extensively on the global garment industry, non-state gender justice systems, and the cultural politics of Islam and nationalism in Bangladesh. She is currently engaged in a project on economic development, discourses of empowerment and the travels of civilizational feminisms. Her publications are available here. She is a member of the NYU Society of Fellows, on the advisory board of Dialectical Anthropology, and on the editorial board of Routledge’s Women in Asia Publication Series. She is on the Executive Committee of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS), and an Advisory Council member of the South Asian feminist network, Sangat.

Naeem Mohaiemen is a visual artist and academic who combines photography, films, and essays to research the many forms of utopia-dystopia (families, borders, architecture, and uprisings) in the Muslim World after 1945. He is Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Head of Photography Concentration at Columbia University, New York. His is the author of Midnight’s Third Child (Dhaka: Nokta / University of Liberal Arts, 2023) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); editor of Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Dhaka: Drishtipat, 2010); and co-editor with Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must be Defended (Budapest: Tranzit / University of Budapest, 2023).

David Ludden is Professor of Political Economy and Globalization in the Department of History at New York University. His research has focused on southern India, Bangladesh, and northeast India. His publications include four edited volumes, three monographs, and dozens of articles and chapters exploring various dimensions of capitalist economic development and long-term globalization. He served as President of the Association for Asian Studies and is founding director of the NYU Global Asia program, based in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai. 

Workshop: “Global Africa Meets Global Asia”

WITH FOLLOW-UP MEETINGS PLANNED FOR NEW YORK, ABU DHABI, AND ACCRA

Time:
Jan 21 | 10:00 am – 7:00 pm
Jan 22 | 9:30 am – 1:00 pm
Abu Dhabi time zone

Location:
In-Person (NYUAD Campus, Room A6-001) and on Zoom

The NYU Center for Global Asia, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation – and in collaboration with the NYUAD Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World, is hosting a workshop at NYU Abu Dhabi on Africa-Asia interactions on January 21 and 22, 2023.

Panels will explore African and African diaspora connectivities and mobilities linked to Asia, focusing on the themes of slavery and its legacies in Black Atlantic-Indian Ocean-Gulf crosscurrents; modern cross-migrations and informal economies; diasporic identity-formation and politics; and Blackness in the Global South.

NYUAD is an ideal location to critically examine the geography of Africa-Asia in the Global South and to bring together scholars from around the world who work in different languages and disciplines from history to film and visual arts. This two-day workshop is thus open to the NYUAD community and by invitation. Please register here.

Convened by

David Ludden, Professor of History, New York University
Shobana Shankar, Professor of History, Stony Brook University

Convened by:
               – David Ludden, Professor of History, New York University
               – Shobana Shankar, Professor of History, Stony Brook University

Hosted by
NYUAD Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World

In Collaboration with
NYU Center for Global Asia, NYUAD Division of Arts & Humanities, Henry Luce Foundation, and NYUAD African Studies

This will be our first in-person (and Hybrid) meeting since March 2020. We must observe NYU Covid Protocols, which are here.

Dec 9. 4-7pm. Nile Green, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding, Yale University Press, 2022. [Hybrid Zoom-In-person in King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC 53 Wash Sq South) auditorium] A pioneering history of inter-Asian understanding that shows the cultural constraints on the call for Asian unity.  In the nineteenth century, Europe’s empires built vast Asian transport networks to maximize the profits of trade, while Christian missionaries spread printing to bring Bibles to the colonized. The unintended consequence was an Asian communications revolution: a new public sphere that stretched from Istanbul to Yokohama. From all corners of the continent, inquisitive individuals tried to study each other’s cultures, turning the infrastructures of empire to their own exploratory ends. Whether in Japanese or Persian, Bengali or Arabic, they wrote travelogues, histories, and phrasebooks to chart the widely different regions that Europe’s geographers labeled “Asia.” But comprehension does not always keep pace with connection. Far from flowing smoothly, inter‑Asian understanding faced obstacles of many kinds, especially on a landmass with so many scripts and languages. Here is the dramatic story of cross-cultural knowledge on the world’s largest continent, showing the historical constraints on the call for Asian unity.

30-minute Book Talk RECORDING

Full-length Book Talk RECORDING

Nile Green is Professor of History at UCLA, where he holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History. Green is a historian of the multiple globalizations of Islam and Muslims. After beginning his career as a historian of India and Pakistan, he has traced Muslim networks that connect Afghanistan, Iran, the Indian Ocean, Africa, Japan, Europe and America. A former Guggenheim Fellow, his previous books include Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean (Cambridge University Press, 2013) (which won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award and the Association for Asian Studies’ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Book Award); The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London (Princeton University Press, 2015) (a New York Times editors’ choice); and Global Islam: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020). He also hosts the podcast Akbar’s Chamber: Experts Talk Islam.

Tansen Sen is Professor of History and the Director of the Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai, China, and Associated Professor of History at NYU. He received his MA from Peking University, China, and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. He is the author of Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400 (‎Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013 , 2016) and India, China, and the World: A Connected History (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017). He has co-authored (with Victor H. Mair) Traditional China in Asian and World History (Columbia University Press, 2012), edited Buddhism Across Asia: Networks of Material, Cultural and Intellectual Exchange (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and co-edited (with Burkhard Schnepel) Travelling Pasts: The Politics of Cultural Heritage in the Indian Ocean World (BRILL, 2019) and (with Brian Tsui) Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India 1840s–1960s (Oxford University Press, 2021). He is currently working on a book entitled The History and Heritage of Zheng He, a monograph on Jawaharlal Nehru and China, and co-editing (with Engseng Ho) the Cambridge History of the Indian Ocean, volume 1.

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite is a Professor of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Arts & Science. Zvi has served as Director of the History Department’s MA program in World History, as Acting Director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and as Chair of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Specializing in Chinese and Islamic History, Zvi’s research centers on the interaction between religions in world history and cultural exchanges across space and time. He is the author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Harvard University Press, 2005); The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford University Press, 2009); and more recently, an edited volume on Middle Eastern Jewish Thought (Brandeis University Press, 2013); an edited volume on Sovereignty (forthcoming with Columbia University Press); and a monograph entitled Crescent China: Islam and Nation after Empire (forthcoming with Oxford University Press).

Tatiana Linkhoeva is Assistant Professor of History at NYU. Her research and teaching interests center on imperial Japan, collaboration and resistance, and social/ist imaginaries. Her book, Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism (Cornell University Press, 2020), examined the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917 on the Japanese Left and Japan’s imperial policy. Her second project is a comparative study of Japanese and Soviet empires and their colonial policies on the Mongolian territories. She is the East Asia Editor for the Oxford University Press Online Research Encyclopedia of Asian History.

30-minute Book Talk RECORDING

Full-length Book Talk RECORDING

Dec 2. 10:00-12:00. [Zoom Meeting] A discussion of Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia, featuring essays by Rohan D’Souza, May Joseph and Sudipta Sen. This book is a part of a new Routledge series,  Ocean and Island Studies. It is a collection of essays focused on coasts, islands, and shorelines, written by historians, anthropologists, and environmentalists. It advances our understanding of the lesser-studied lifeworlds of the South Asian littoral that are neither fully aquatic or terrestrial, and inescapably both. Invoking a ‘third surface’ located in the interstice of land and water―deltas, estuaries, tidelands, beaches, swamps, sandbanks, and mudflats―Terra Aqua aims at a radical reconceptualization of coastal and shoreline terrains. It explores threatened lives, endangered habitats and emergent templates of survival against the backdrop of rising seas and the climatic upheavals, with particular focus on the Bengal and Malabar coastlines. It examines salinity and submergence, coastal erosion, subterranean degradation, and the erosion of littoral lives, livelihoods and habitats. This is a book for all students and scholars of the environment who are interested in the changing coastal ecologies and environments of Asia.

RECORDING

Rohan D’Souza is professor at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University. His PhD was awarded from the Centre for Historical Studies (Jawaharlal Nehru University). He was elected General Secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student’s Union (1989-90). He is the author of Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood control in Eastern India (Oxford University Press New Delhi, 2006). His research interests include themes on environmental history and modern technology, such as hydraulic transition, modernity, colonialism, and rivers. D’Souza’s research discipline encompasses social and political philosophy, philosophy of science, and humanities and the social sciences.

May Joseph is the founder of Harmattan Theatre and professor of social science at Pratt Institute, and author of the books Aquatopia: Climate Interventions (Routledge, 2022); Ghosts of Lumumba (Poetics Lab, 2020); Sealog: Indian Ocean to New York (Routledge, 2019); Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination (Duke University Press, 2013); and Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Joseph is also co-editor (with Sudipta Sen) of Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia (Routledge, 2022) and of Performing Hybridity (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). She co-edits three book series from Routledge: Critical Climate Studies, Ocean and Island Studies, and Kaleidoscope: Ethnography, Art, Architecture and Archaeology. Joseph creates site specific performances along Dutch and Portuguese maritime routes exploring climate issues. Additional work by Joseph can be found at: www.mayjoseph.com

Sudipta Sen is professor of history and Middle East/South Asia studies, University of California, Davis. A scholar of Late Mughal and British India, British Empire, and Environment and Ecology, his early work has focused on the history of British expansion in India. He is author of Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (Routledge, 2002); Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River (Yale University Press, 2019) and a co-editor of the Routledge Ocean and Island Studies book series. A recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic Excellence Award (2021-23), he was recently presented with the William Jones Memorial Medal by the Asiatic Society of India for his contribution to the fields of Asian Studies and History.  

Oct 21. 12pm. [Zoom Meeting] Dilip Menon, Renisa Mawani, and Isabel Hofmeyr. “Oceanic Methodologies: A Conversation.” Based on the recent anthology, Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime, edited by Dilip Menon, Nishat Zaidi, Simi Malhotra, and Saarah Jappie (Routledge, India, April 2022) — here are page proofs — this panel will focus on Chapter One, Dilip Menon, “Oceanic Histories: from the Terrestrial to the Maritime,” to explore its argument that the ocean presents a new way of thinking about the humanities and social sciences in our fraught era of global warming and climate uncertainty. The panel will consider how such an ocean-centric approach might offer new perspectives and engagements challenging long-standing paradigms of world history and environmental studies. Dilip will open the conversation; Renisa and Isabel will respond; and Sudipta Sen and May Joseph will moderate. (This meeting launches our Port City Environments project, Anthropocene Ecologies, and Climate Futures)

RECORDING: Speaker View. Gallery View.

Dilip Menon is Professor of History, Department of International Relations and Director, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of the Witwatersrand. Dilip does research in World Literatures, Cultural History and Cultural Anthropology. He works on oceanic histories and knowledge from the global south. His current project is on thinking about historical imagination in South Asia. His recent book is Introduction to Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (Oxford University Press, 2020), which is a global history of capitalisms from the 10th to the 18th century covering themes like silver, slavery and a geography extending from China, India and SE Asia to the Ottoman, Safavid and Russian empires. 

Renisa Mawani is Associate Professor of Sociology and Founding Chair of the Law and Society Minor Program at the University of British Columbia. She works on the conjoined histories of Indigeneity, Asian migration, and settler colonialism and has published widely on law and coloniality and legal geography. Her research coalesces at the juncture of critical theory and British colonial legal history. Her research interests include historical/comparative sociologies of empire, sociologies of modernity, law and nature, postcolonial theory, biopolitics and racisms, cosmopolitanism, affect, law and society in South Asia. She is the author of Colonial Proximities (University of British Columbia Press, 2009), Across Oceans of Law (Duke University Press, 2018), and a series of articles, which have been published in Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and Annual Review of Law and Social Science, and elsewhere.

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at NYU. She has worked extensively on the Indian Ocean world and oceanic themes more generally. Her most recent book is Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (Duke University Press, 2022). Over the last two decades, she has pioneered research on global, oceanic and transnational forms of literary and cultural history that seek to understand Africa’s place in the world. With Charne Lavery, she runs a project Oceanic Humanities for the Global South with partners from Mozambique, India, Jamaica and Barbados.

May Joseph is the founder of Harmattan Theatre and professor of social science at Pratt Institute, and author of the books Aquatopia: Climate Interventions (Routledge, 2022); Ghosts of Lumumba (Poetics Lab, 2020); Sealog: Indian Ocean to New York (Routledge, 2019); Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination (Duke University Press, 2013); and Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Joseph is also co-editor (with Sudipta Sen) of Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia (Routledge, 2022) and of Performing Hybridity (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). She co-edits three book series from Routledge: Critical Climate Studies, Ocean and Island Studies, and Kaleidoscope: Ethnography, Art, Architecture and Archaeology. Joseph creates site specific performances along Dutch and Portuguese maritime routes exploring climate issues. Additional work by Joseph can be found at: www.mayjoseph.com

Sudipta Sen is professor of history and Middle East/South Asia studies, University of California, Davis. A scholar of Late Mughal and British India, British Empire, and Environment and Ecology, his early work has focused on the history of British expansion in India. He is author of Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (Routledge, 2002); Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River (Yale University Press, 2019) and a co-editor of the Routledge Ocean and Island Studies book series. A recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic Excellence Award (2021-23), he was recently (2021) presented with the William Jones Memorial Medal by the Asiatic Society of India for his contribution to the fields of Asian Studies and History.

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