All posts by ss11375

Global Asia Colloquium | April 5 | Gyan Prakash | Co-sponsored by South Asia NYU

Event Archive, Friday Colloquium, Uncategorized

The Global Asia Colloquium

APRIL 5, 2019, 4:00-6:45. 

701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South). With Wine and Cheese. 

A Book Launch of US Edition for Gyan Prakash’s new book,         
Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point

with discussion by Manu Bhagavan (Hunter College, CUNY), Manu Goswami (NYU), Meghna Chaudhuri (NYU), and Sanjay Ruparelia (The New School)

On the night of June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India, suspending constitutional rights and rounding up her political opponents in midnight raids across the country. In the twenty-one harrowing months that followed, her regime unleashed a brutal campaign of coercion and intimidation, arresting and torturing people by the tens of thousands, razing slums, and imposing compulsory sterilization on the poor. Emergency Chronicles provides the first comprehensive account of this understudied episode in India’s modern history. Gyan Prakash strips away the comfortable myth that the Emergency was an isolated event brought on solely by Gandhi’s desire to cling to power, arguing that it was as much the product of Indian democracy’s troubled relationship with popular politics.

Drawing on archival records, private papers and letters, published sources, film and literary materials, and interviews with victims and perpetrators, Prakash traces the Emergency’s origins to the moment of India’s independence in 1947, revealing how the unfulfilled promise of democratic transformation upset the fine balance between state power and civil rights. He vividly depicts the unfolding of a political crisis that culminated in widespread popular unrest, which Gandhi sought to crush by paradoxically using the law to suspend lawful rights. Her failure to preserve the existing political order had lasting and unforeseen repercussions, opening the door for caste politics and Hindu nationalism.

Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. His many books include Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City (Princeton), Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India, and Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton). He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

 

 

*Abstract and bio retrieved from Princeton University Press, 2019

 

Global Asia Colloquium | April 19 | Conflict, Mobility, and Empire

Event Archive, Friday Colloquium
GLOBAL ASIA COLLOQUIUM
April 19, 2019, 4:00-6:45
KJCC 701 (53 Washington Square South, 7th Floor)
with wine and cheese
 
CONFLICT,  MOBILITY, and EMPIRE
 
 
Title: “Empire’s Tracks”
 
Empire’s Tracks boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the imperial foundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisited interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism. This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the transcontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire.
 
 
 
Title: “Opportunity, Mobility, and Anticolonialism in Southeast Asia during the Great War.”
 

Abstract: In 1914, small but significant numbers of anticolonial revolutionaries living in and moving through Southeast Asia saw the war between the Allied and Central powers as an opportunity. Members of the Indian diasporic group called Ghadr and the Viet Nam Restoration Association, especially, saw the enmity between their colonial oppressors and Germany as a chance to gain the financial and material backing they needed to finally win control over their territories. This talk focuses on the ways members of both groups sought to use independent Siam as a base for undermining colonial rule in India and Indochina. More generally, it explores the ways the peculiar geography and geopolitical configuration of Southeast Asia encouraged enemies of the Allies to use the neutral states that surrounded their colonies to foment revolution. 

Heather Streets-Salter is Professor and Director of World History Programs at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her Ph.D. in History from Duke University in 1998. She is the author of World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Martial Races: The Military, Martial Races, and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914 (Manchester University Press, 2004), Traditions and Encounters: A Brief Global History (McGraw-Hill, 2006) with Jerry Bentley and Herb Ziegler (now in its fourth edition), and Empires and Colonies in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2015) with Trevor Getz. Her next project is called The Chill Before the Cold War: Communism and Anti-Communism in Colonial Southeast Asia in the Interwar Period.

Global Asia | May 10 | Commodities, Nations, and Globalization

Event Archive, Friday Colloquium

The Global Asia Colloquium

May 10, 2019. 4:00-6:45. 

701KJCC (53 Washington Square South).  With Wine and Cheese.

Come One and Come All !!

Commodities, Nations, and Globalization

4:00-5:15. “The Symbolism of Dates in the Arabian Gulf States,” by Elise Bortz, Catherine Korren, Ha-Young Kwon, Richard Seeno, and Taylor Upchurch

In the face of rapid industrial development, how are the Arabian Gulf States reinstating the symbol of the date palm to affirm national identity? In this talk, we conduct a regional case study by examining the material culture of the United Arab Emirates. We will make the claim that the symbol of the date serves as a postmodern romanticization of a preindustrial Arabia. We cite the discovery of oil in the 20th century as a catalyst to the economic development of the region, yet also a motive in the reestablished cultural symbolism of the date. Today, the domestic date production represents less than 1% of the United Arab Emirates’ GDP. Thus we postulate that the fruit continues to serve as a cultural figurehead, which brings to light an inherent contradiction: the date, while seemingly indicative of national values, is invariably excluded from national production. We argue that this underscores the country’s emphasis on cultural capital as opposed to economic imperatives, highlighting the date’s existence as a historically tethered and culturally restorative symbol of the nation.

Presented by five undergraduate sophomore Dean’s Circle Honors Scholars in Liberal Studies.

Elise Bortz is pursuing a degree in Media, Culture and Communications with a minor in Business of Entertainment and Media Technologies. She is from the Bay Area. She has spent her time as a student writer, and currently works as a Development Intern at Jigsaw Productions.

Richard Seeno is from the Bay Area. He is double majoring in Global Liberal Studies and Italian Studies and minoring in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. As part of the Liberal Studies First Year Away Program, he spent his freshman year in Florence, where he will return for his junior year.

Catherine Korren is from Long Island. She is pursuing a major in Global Liberal Studies, concentrating in Politics, Rights and Development, with a double minor in Peace and Conflict Studies and Computer Science. She will be spending her junior year at NYU Tel Aviv.

Ha-Young Kwon is from Boston, pursuing a major in Media, Culture, and Communications. She participated in a gap year in the Fiji Islands as an international service volunteer before spending her freshman year in Paris, France with the Liberal Studies First Year Away program.

Taylor Upchurch is from Atlanta, and is a double majoring in History and Politics in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is the President of the Panhellenic Council in NYU’s Student Government Assembly and a member of the American Historical Association.

5:30-6:45. “Indian Pharma,  Ayurveda, and Global Patents: A Struggle for the Control of Medical Knowledge,” by Murphy Halliburton

Based on fieldwork in India (Kerala and Hyderabad) and the U.S., this presentation
examines the struggle between Indian pharmaceutical companies and global big pharma with a focus on the production of AIDS drugs and concerns about biopiracy of ayurvedic medical knowledge. Considering the views of activists, NGOs and pharmaceutical producers, this paper warns of public health concerns now that the conditions for Indian companies to produce and export medications have changed under the current WTO-enforced patent regime. The presentation will also consider opportunities for resistance and innovation in this regime and how attempts to patent ayurvedic medical products may change this South Asian medical practice.

Murphy Halliburton is Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY) specializing in medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, science and technology studies, and South Asian ethnography. He has conducted research in India on ayurvedic medicine, treatments for psychopathology, the Indian pharmaceutical sector, and struggles over drug patents. He is the author of Mudpacks and Prozac: Experiencing Ayurvedic, Biomedical, and Religious Healing (Routledge, 2009) and India and the Patent Wars: Pharmaceuticals in the New Intellectual Property Regime (Cornell University Press, 2017).

November 30 | Marilyn B. Young Memorial Lecture | Guest Speaker: Paul A. Kramer

Event Archive, Friday Colloquium

 

Sovereignty’s Edges: U. S. Immigration Control and the Boundaries of American Power in the Long 20th Century

By Paul A. Kramer 

Friday, November 30, 4-6 pm

Glucksman Ireland House, 1 Washington Mews

This talk, adapted from a book in progress, explores struggles over the degree to which migration control should be a sovereign prerogative of the U. S. national state, from the mid-19th century through the “war on terror.” Despite the commonplace that immigration control is an inherent and defining feature of national sovereignty, in the United States as elsewhere, the sovereign control of immigration was a political invention, with a contentious and contingent history worth reconstructing. Even as national institutions increasingly monopolized immigration control across the 20th century, the process was shot through with tensions and contradictions, shaped by both global and domestic political constraints, and bound by limitations that generated intense unease among nationalists fronting an unconquerable world.

Paul Kramer will explore five aspects of this history: the shift from bilateral, treaty-based immigration policy to Congressional policy-making; federalist tensions between state and national jurisdiction over immigration policy; the role of war in intensifying sovereign control; challenges to sovereignty posed by the advent of multilateral institutions; and the question of whether and how international refugee policy would be incorporated into U. S. law. In each of these processes, struggles over the sovereign control of immigration were inseparably entangled with and structured by racial, religious, gendered, economic and imperial hierarchies, and played profound and understudied roles in the building of U. S. national institutions and nationalist ideologies.

Here are related readings.

COME ONE AND COME ALL!

 

 

 

November 16 | Laws of Men and the Science of Nature: Credit, Climate and Calamity in the Bay of Bengal

Event Archive, Friday Colloquium, Uncategorized


Presentation by Debjani Bhattacharyya
Friday, November 16

 Here is the reading for the Friday colloquium. This is Chapter 1 from Bhattacharya’s book, “Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta“

In 1865 British colonial officials set up a department called the “Wrecks in Indian Waters” to record shipwrecks in the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. The purpose of recording shipwrecks was threefold: assessing the nature of disaster at sea, their causes and develop precise predictions. The audience for these annual reports were multiple. While they were initially produced under the military auspices these reports were migrated into the Trade and Commerce department within a decade, and was widely read and referred to by colonial meteorologists and tidal scientist. At the same time the narrative of the reports of the Indian Wrecks Department was produced as a documentation to be used in marine insurance settlement cases. An analysis of the reports reveal how narrative causality was used to reconstruct the moment of wreck and the knowledge production about human error vis-à-vis natural disaster on a sliding scale. By analyzing how colonial meteorologists and tidal scientists mined these reports produced for insurance settlement claims, this paper asks what continuities might we trace between a legal narrative structure of arranging events, producing evidence, validating claims and similar concerns in the writings of colonial meteorological scientists. 

4:00-6:45 p.m. in 701 KJCC
7E, Seventh Floor
(53 Washington Square South)
with wine and cheese!

Looking ahead:

Week 11. 30-Nov. Paul A. Kramer (History, Vanderbilt University), Marilyn Young Memorial                                         Lecture and Reception, Glucksman Ireland House, 4:00-6:30      

Week 12. 7-Dec. Tatiana Linkhoeva (History) and Fred Cooper (History)  

Week 13. 14-Dec. Heather Lee (History, NYUSH) and Jerome Whitington (Anthropology)

COME ONE AND COME ALL !!!

November 9 | Chen Jian on Shanghai Underground, 1927-1931

Event Archive, Friday Colloquium

 

Nov 9

Chen Jian’s paper “Shanghai Underground, 1927-1931,” is draft Chapter 7 of his Zhou Enlai biography, “Zhou Enlai: The Man and His Times,” and still a work in progress. 

4:00-6:45 p.m. in 701 KJCC
7E, Seventh Floor
(53 Washington Square South)
with wine and cheese!

 

Looking ahead:

Week 10. 16-Nov. Debjani Bhattacharya (Drexel University), on the building of Calcutta

Week 11. 30-Nov. Paul A. Kramer (History, Vanderbilt University), Marilyn Young Memorial                                         Lecture and Reception, Glucksman Ireland House, 4:00-6:30      

Week 12. 7-Dec. Tatiana Linkhoeva (History) and Fred Cooper (History)  

Week 13. 14-Dec. Heather Lee (History, NYUSH) and Jerome Whitington (Anthropology)

 Come one and come all !!!