From Tatiana

Cluster “Political Mobility”

The aspirations of social thoughts and movements of the modern period often transcended national boundaries and were truly global. The universalist ideas –  socialism, anarchism, communism, (Christianity and Buddhism) – as well as their texts and people had a transnational organization and built local organizations, often in port cities. Port cities acted as necessary gateways and connecting hubs for these universalist visions to move inward and outward, and to mobilize the “masses” into international kinship of various registers. It was also in port cities where the state worked on curbing those internationalist activities.

The increasingly globalized political (and religious) activism across Asia, broadly defined to include the Asian territories of the Russian Empire/Soviet Union, Northeast, South and Southeast Asia, have only recently attracted attention of scholars.

The cluster seeks to promote a cross-border and cross-disciplinary discussion on how various global ideologies of internationalism connected and worked in various local social settings and national discourses. How did local social experience and identity produce specific internationalist modalities in different parts of Asia? What were the transnational networks of Asian revolutionaries, their workings and logistics, its revolutionary geography? How these universalist thoughts and movements were filtered through multiple lenses: religious, ethnic, imperial, national, and colonial?  

Planning Documents: “Port City Environments in Global Asia”

•                  The Luce Grant Program Framework (January 2017)
•                  Executive Summary (draft for the applications)
•                  Grant Planning Timetable (21 Sept 2017) 
•                  On Clusters and Initial Conference (27 Sept 2017)

Cluster on Materialities/Aesthetics of Port City Environments

Scholarship on port cities often focuses on long-distance exchange and the circulation of materials, people, and capital across complex systems. Such analyses have produced major insights into transoceanic trade networks, global politics, and long-term diasporas, moving research beyond the area studies paradigm in important ways. But such studies also often deploy macro-scale perspectives, emphasizing movements across vast spaces and temporalities. But what happens to things and people once they stop moving in a network and come to rest in a local place? After all, while ports are in many ways first and foremost transport and travel hubs, they are also local places with a lively and energetic materiality of their own. This cluster seeks to address this materiality by orienting the study of port cities toward the cultural. Members of this cluster will ask questions about the kinds of modes of being and seeing port cities embody and enact. A focus on the materiality — as opposed to the discursive – also foregrounds the affective and the “real” of life in maritime cities. That is, how are the physical spaces of port harbors, its architectures, urban plans, food cultures, and arts of self-fashioning sites of cultural inscription and symbolic expression? Beyond facilitating circulation and exchange, how do port cities address, even constitute people as mobile or even immobile subjects? How can accounts of the physical matter and popular culture of port city encompass the politics of territoriality and also reveal its creative and imaginary dimensions? Further, a focus on ports as cultural spaces foregrounds how maritime and land-based places must be brought into the same analytical frame.

The GLOBAL ASIA COLLOQUIUM meets weekly on Fridays 4-6PM with wine and cheese in 53 Washington Square South, King Juan Carlos Center, Rm 607. 

Our meetings in September 2017 will be concerned with filling out a line-up of activities for the first year of our 3-year Luce Grant on “Port City Environments in Global Asla.” The grant proposal is due later in the term and we need a nice formulation of plans for year #1. I will send out a description of the overall grant program as soon as possible.

Asher Ghertner wil give a job talk for the URBAN HUMANITIES MELLON PROFESSORSHIP

in the Department of Art History, 303 Silver Center, Jan 31, 6:15.  TITLE OF TALK TBA.

He describes himself on his Rutgers DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY webpage thus:

I am an interdisciplinary geographer interested in the technologies and tactics through which mass displacement is conceived, justified and enacted. My research uses the contemporary politics of urban renewal in India to challenge conventional theories of economic transition, city planning, and political rule. I taught for two years at the London School of Economics before joining Rutgers in 2012. I am also the Director of the South Asian Studies Program at Rutgers.

My book (Oxford University Press, 2015) uses the case of Delhi’s millennial effort to become a world-class city to show how aesthetic norms can replace the procedures of mapping and surveying typically considered necessary to administer space. The practice of evaluating territory based on its adherence to aesthetic norms – what I call “rule by aesthetics” – allowed the state in Delhi to intervene in the once ungovernable space of slums, overcoming its historical reliance on inaccurate maps and statistics. Slums were declared illegal because they looked illegal, an arrangement that led to the displacement of a million slum residents in the first decade of the 21st century. Drawing on close ethnographic engagement with the slum residents targeted for removal, as well as the planners, judges, and politicians who targeted them, the book demonstrates how easily plans, laws, and democratic procedures can be subverted once the subjects of democracy are seen as visually out of place. Slum dwellers’ creative appropriation of dominant aesthetic norms shows, however, that aesthetic rule does not mark the end of democratic claims making. Rather, it signals a new relationship between the mechanism of government and the practice of politics, one in which struggles for a more inclusive city rely more than ever on urban aesthetics, in Delhi and in aspiring world-class cities the world over.

His book

Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi

is also described on the SSRC WEBSITE.

This GoogleDrive file folder contains a Cumulative Chronological Collection of NY-CGA Documents.

It will open and all the files will be available from emails @nyu.edu. If you do not have @nyu.edu email,

please contact me for access to these files. del5@nyu.edu.

Hi

This is the Forum for the NY Center for Global Asia. Please send blog entries

for posting to blogpostcga@gmail.com and we will post them for you.

cheers

the management