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.

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.

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).

Global Asia
at
Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora
 

POSTPONED

A Book Discussion with Francis Cody (University of Toronto)
of his new book

The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization (University of Chicago Press, 2023)

with 

Arjun Appadurai (NYU Emeritus)

Lily Chumley (NYU)

and Debashree Mukherjee (Columbia)

In the hypermediated world of Tamil Nadu, Francis Cody studies how “news events” are made. Not merely the act of representing events with words or images, a “news event” is the reciprocal relationship between the events being reported in the news and the event of the news coverage itself. In The News Event, Cody focuses on how imaginaries of popular sovereignty have been remade through the production and experience of such events. Political sovereignty is thoroughly mediated by the production of news. And subjects invested in the idea of democracy are remarkably reflexive about the role of publicly circulating images and texts in the very constitution of their subjectivity. The law comes to stand as both a limit and positive condition in this process of event making, where acts of legal and extralegal repression of publication can also become the stuff of news about news makers. When the subjects of news inhabit multiple participant roles in the unfolding of public events, when the very technologies of recording and circulating events themselves become news, the act of representing a political event becomes difficult to disentangle from that of participating in it. This, Cody argues, is the crisis of contemporary news making: the news can no longer claim exteriority to the world on which it reports. 

Francis Cody is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto, where he is also the Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies. His research focuses on politics and media in southern India. His first book, The Light of Knowledge: Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in South India (Cornell 2013), won the 2014 Edward Sapir Book Prize awarded by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. Cody’s new book, The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization (Chicago 2023) explores questions of law, technology, and violence in the context of journalism and populist politics. 

 
Sponsored by

with wine and cheeseCOME ONE AND COME ALL !!!

HERE IS THE RECORDING (not great, with echo, but functional; because the recording is from a mic in a zoom screen in a meeting room, distant from speakers, rather with close-up mics in an all-zoom meeting)