In addition to our Friday Colloquium (stay tuned for schedule), we have a number of special events in Spring 2020. These build toward a second round of grant applications for research projects that will be designed to enrich our evolving three-campus Global Asia curriculum. We have organized our research to focus on three broad themes, to be based on our three campuses. All of this work will combine the diverse multi-disciplinary perspectives and wide range of scholarly interests that define our Global Asia intellectual community.

“The Space of the Belt-Road-Initiative” (NYUSH).
“Mobility and Migration” (NYUNY)
“Environments” (NYUAD)

Special events in New York in Spring 2020 concern people living in spaces of mobility divided by national state state borders in the twentieth century.

Wed Feb 12, 5:00-7:00. “Beyond the Crisis Narrative: Entangled Pasts and Possible Futures of Rohingya in Bangladesh and Burma.” Room 743 BOBST LIBRARY, 70 Washington Sq. South, New York University

Speakers: Shireen Huq, Founder, Narippokho. Mabrur Ahmed, Director, Restless Beings. Rahima Begum, Co-Director, Restless Beings. Zaid Hydari, Co-founder, Refugee Solidarity Network. 

Moderator:   Dina M. Siddiqi, Liberal Studies

We will use this opportunity to:
1) disentangle the various myths and narratives around Rohingya identity and claims to Myanmar citizenship, especially in relation to Bengali/Bangladeshi identity;

2) analyze the multilayered and often contradictory implications — for the Bangladeshi state, transnational actors, and various communities within its borders — of living in/hosting what is now apparently the world’s largest refugee camp;

3) explore possibilities for moving forward, and the implications of the recent ICJ judgment; and

4) Locate and contextualize the Rohingya expulsion in light of similar processes elsewhere in the postcolonial world, with particular attention to the implementation of the National Register of Citizens in Assam.

Feb 24. 6:00-8:00 Marilyn Young Memorial Lecture, NYU Ballet Center, 20 Cooper Square.

Fri-Sat Feb 28-29. 12th Annual NYU Global South Asia Conference: “Afterlives of Decolonization.” Kevorkian Library, Fri 5-7, Sat 9-5

Tues Feb 25 and Tues March 3. “Border Talks.” Center for the Humanities, 20 Cooper Square 5th Fl, 5:00-7:00. (These talks frame conceptual approaches to borders and explore spaces of mobility/immobility, imaginaries of closure or opening, and acts of resistance.)

February 25.

Julie Mostov (Liberal Studies) “Resisting the Challenge of Hard Borders”
Christian Martin (Center for European and Mediterranean Studies) “Structural Transformation of Democracy: Globalization and Conceptions of National Borders”
David Ludden (History) “A History of Violence – Borders and South Asia”
Cristina Beltran (Social and Cultural Analysis)”Migrant Violence and the Dream of Frontier Freedom.”
Simón Ventura Trujillo (English) “The Borderlands and Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Studies.”

March 3
Dina Siddiqi (Liberal Studies) “Bordering Practices and the Making of Muslim Bodies.”
Natasha Iskander (Wagner School of Public Policy) “How the Border Splits the Body”
Jini Kim Watson (English and Comparative Literature) “Genres of the Borderscape: Behrouz Boochani and Australia’s Offshore Detention ‘Regime’”
Vasuki Nesiah (Gallatin School of Individualized Study)”Spatial Imaginaries of Closure”
Marie Cruz Soto (Gallatin School of Individualized Study) “Colonial Borders: Puerto Rico and the US Empire”

Tues March 31. 5PM. Book Launch for Sanjib Baruah, In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast.

Xinjiang and the Uyghur Question in China Today

A Round-table discussion

Monday, October 29, 4-6 PM

907 Kimmel (Seating is Limited)

Participants.

Jim Millward, Professor of History, Georgetown University

Ajinur Setiwaldi, Urghur Activist  and Immigration Lawyer

Magnus Fiskesjo, Anthropology/Asian Studies, Cornell University

Huang Yifan, Artist and Photographer

Moderated by

Rebecca Karl, Professor of History, NYU

Open to NYU Students, Faculty, Staff, and the Public

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A WORLD TRANSFORMED?

REASSESSING 1968 AND THE GLOBAL SIXTIES

Tuesday, October 9

6:00 PM – 7:30 PM

19 Washington Square North

Featuring

Chen Jian, Distinguished Global Network Professor of History, NYU Shanghai

Martin Klimke, Vice Provost for Academic Policies and Governance, Program Head/Associate Professor of History, NYUAD

Mary Nolan, Professor Emerita of History, NYU

Manijeh Nasrabadi, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College

“Alufa Rufino, a Man of Faith and Sorcery in the Periphery of Islam”  

 a talk by João Reis

King Juan Carlos Center auditorium (53 Wash Sq South)

3:00 to 4:30PM, Wednesday, October 24th. 

Sponsored in part by the NY Center for Global Asia

Brazil, and particularly Bahia, was arguably the destination of most African Muslims deported from West Africa to the Americas on board slave ships during the first half of the nineteenth century. They were mainly Hausas, Nupes, and Yorubas who, once in Brazil, were involved in several slave revolts. This is a well-known story. What is less well-known is that parallel to this militant Islam, there were other, more accommodationist forms of Islam that also flourished among African slaves and freed people in Brazil. This lecture is about a man who represented  this form of Islam. A devout Muslim, Abuncare (a.k.a, Rufino José Maria) nonetheless dedicated himself to divination and other unorthodox practices that he learned in Africa and either reproduced in Brazil or adapted to Brazilian belief systems.

Global Asia Conference
“Port City Environments in Global Asia”
25-27 May, 2018
King Juan Carlos Center Atrium Auditorium
53 Washington Square South

HERE IS THE LINK TO DRAFT CONFERENCE OUTLINE submitted to Luce Foundation as part of our grant application.

HERE IS THE LINK to the Google Form in which you can enter information concerning your participation in the Conference. 

Carol Breckenridge Memorial Lecture

9 April 2018, The New School, Klein Conference Room, 66 West 12th St. Rm 510, 6:30-8:00PM 

David Ludden

“Global Asia and Postcolonial Predicaments: How to historicize the Rohingya Crisis.” Here is a draft of the substance of the paper, with a new title.

The horrors suffered by Rohingyas in Myanmar today – which now appear ever more frequently and graphically in the news — represent one brutal extremity of a kind of victimization that haunts countless people whose only crime is living in old spaces of human mobility that modern empires carved into national territories. Methodological nationalism justifies their precarity with histories that provide charters for national belonging, tying citizens firmly to specific places inside national borders. In a world covered by nations, human rights depend on that belonging. Old spaces of mobility can thus become perilous homelands where nations produce minorities as aliens eligible for marginalization, exclusion, and expulsion. Histories of mobile social space may implicitly disenfranchise their residents, but we need those histories to escape methodological nationalism and explore interactions of mobility and territoriality that generate globalization, at many levels of scale. All these post-colonial predicaments challenge any history of the Rohingya crisis, which I approach here through local histories of Global Asia around the Bay of Bengal.

Vincente Rafael

The Hazards of Witnessing: Photographing the Philippine Drug War

April 10, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor, 5:30-7:30PM, 

Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, with light refreshments

In this paper, I inquire into the narco- and necro-politics of the war on drugs under the regime of Pres. Rodrigo Duterte. While still popular among his supporters, the war has nonetheless also called forth other responses. One example has been the work of photojournalists. In the context of the drug war, how does photojournalism become a kind of advocacy as much as a form of mourning? How is trauma and witnessing braided together in the experience of photographers covering the drug war? What are the ambivalent effects of aestheticizing the image of those killed by the police and their death squads? How does the aesthetic rendering of death make possible the act of witnessing even as it repeatedly endangers it? What is the fate of photographic images once rendered into commodities by the global media and put into circulation for the consumption of anonymous viewers? And among families of the victims, how is the dead remembered in ways that elude photographic capture?  

Global Asia Conference
“Port City Environments in Global Asia”
25-27 May, 2018
King Juan Carlos Center Atrium Auditorium
53 Washington Square South

HERE IS THE LINK TO DRAFT CONFERENCE OUTLINE submitted to Luce Foundation as part of our grant application.

HERE IS THE LINK to the Google Form in which you can enter information concerning your participation in the Conference. 

Ports, Foods, and Connectivities Across the Indian Ocean