Winter School Delhi, India
Doing Cosmopolitanisms: Dynamics of Theory and Practice
* Audio recordings of panels and keynotes are now available. Download your playlist here. *
Description
*The Delhi Winter School took place from December 6-9th 2017 in Delhi, India.
The RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms brings together all its members, as well as inviting fellow Ph.D candidates and scholars in India and the South Asian region, in order to explore practices of cosmopolitanism in a winter school entitled: Doing Cosmopolitanisms: Dynamics of Theory and Practice. The winter school forms part of a larger project, Minor Cosmopolitanisms, that wishes to build new ways of studying and understanding the cosmopolitan project against and beyond its Eurocentric legacies, prompted by a complexity of challenges faced in a globalizing world. The winter school is an extension of ongoing joint supervision, research and teaching between the University of Potsdam (Germany) and its partner universities in Berlin and around the world – Australia, Canada, India, South Africa and the United States of America – in which we hope to create a learning environment of multi-directional exchange.
In order to transcend the division of the cosmopolitan, into either universal (Eurocentric) normative ideal or established reality deemed descriptively assessable, our winter school places emphasis on “doing cosmopolitanisms.” Rather than merely focusing on the socioeconomic dynamics of globalization and its representations, minor cosmopolitanisms focus on practices of being, thinking, feeling and creating in a globalizing world. Among the central questions we ask are: How do we overcome colonial epistemologies? How do we draw applicable knowledge from embodied and singular practices?
It is in this light that the first winter school of the RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms is located physically outside the Euro-American context that too often appears as the centre of cosmopolitanism. Our hope is to learn both from the specificities of local practices and the intellectual questions that the theme of minor cosmopolitanisms opens up across our various fields of scholarship. To this end, we aim to explore where and how academic concerns are manifested through various forms of practice. We turn to scholars, policymakers, practitioners and activists working at the intersections of academia and politics, to envision what “doing” minor cosmopolitanisms might look like. We are (also) interested in critical, artistic as well as everyday practices that performatively bring both historical and current cosmopolitanisms into being by virtue of their worldmaking capacities.
The winter school wishes to engage with practice as theory and theory as practice. We welcome discussions including but not limited:
- contesting colonial epistemologies/ontologies
- dissident democratic formations and ‘post’-democracy
- cosmopolitanizing bodies
- non-Western readings of the West
- access to knowledge and piracy
- subaltern and queer femininities
- caste/race/religious/gender/class epistemologies and violence
- eco-cosmopolitan futures
- (minor) convivial cultures and practices
- critiques of (minor) cosmopolitanism(s)
Winter School Booklet and Program
Click here to download the official booklet and program for the winter school.
Call for Applications
Click here for the official call for applications.
*Note: The call for applications has been closed.
Faculty
Firdous Azim (BRAC University)
Professor Azim is a Professor of English and is chair of the Department of English and Humanities at BRAC University. She is also a member of Naripokkho, a woman’s activist group in Bangladesh. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Sussex, UK in 1989 and was awarded a fellowship by the University as one of its fifty most distinguished alumni and academics in 2012.
She has published widely both in the field of post-colonialism and literature, as well as on feminist issues. Her books include The Colonial Rise of the Novel (Routledge, 1993) and Infinite Variety: Women in Society and Literature (University Press Limited, Dhaka, 1996). She is a contributing editor for Feminist Review, for which she has edited a special issue entitled South Asian Feminisms: Negotiating New Terrains. (March 2009). She has edited a book entitled Complex Terrains: Islam, Culture and Women in Asia (Routledge, March 2013) and co-edited several books including Infinite Variety: Women in Society and Literature (UPL, 1994) and Other Englishes: Essays on Commonwealth Writing (UPL, 1991). She is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies as well as a member of the Board of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society. Her current work is based on research and writing around the cultural history of women in Bangladesh.
Sundar Sarukkai (National Institute of Advanced Sciences)
Professor Sarukkai teaches Philosophy at the National Institute of Advanced Sciences in Bengaluru, India. His research interests are in histories of, conceptions of, and philosophies surrounding science in South Asia. and He has collaborated on such projects such as "Cosmopolitanism and the Local in Science and Nature, East and West," and was on the advisory board of the "Egalitarianism Project." He was the recipient of the PHISPC Fellowship from September 2003 to November 2004 and was a Homi K. Bhabha fellow from June 1997 - May 1999.
Rajni Palriwala (University of Delhi)
Rajni Palriwala, M.A. (J.N.U.), M.Phil., Ph.D. (Delhi) is Professor of Sociology. Her research interests include gender, kinship and marriage, care, citizenship, and the state,feminist theory and politics, agrarian and development studies and comparative sociology. She has authored Changing Kinship, Family and Gender Relations in South Asia: Processes, Trends and Issues (1994) and co-authored Care, Culture and Citizenship: Revisiting the Politics of the Dutch Welfare State (with C, I. Risseeuw and K. Ganesh, 2005). She has co-edited Marriage, Migration, and Gender (with P. Uberoi, 2008), Shifting Circles of Support: Contextualising Kinship and Gender Relations in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (with C. I. Risseeuw, 1996), and Structures and Strategies: Women, Work and Family in Asia (with L. Dube, 1990).
Ira Raja (University of Delhi)
Ira Raja, PhD (La Trobe 2003), M.Phil (Delhi 1996), MA (Delhi 1992), BA (Delhi 1990), is an assistant professor at the University of Delhi's English department. Her areas of interest and research include Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation Studies, Twentieth Century Novel and Poetry, Dalit literature, Indian Literature in English Translation, Literary Gerontology, and Urban Cultures.
Dirk Wiemann (University of Potsdam)
Satish Poduval (EFL University)
Satish Poduval is a professor and head of the Cultural Studies department at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFL) in Hyderabad, India. His research interests include Literary and Cultural Theory, Media and Film Studies and Contemporary Kerala.
Shaswati Mazumdar (University of Delhi)
Shaswati Mazumdar is a professor and head of the Germanic and Romance Studies department at the University of Delhi. From 1972-77 she studied German language and literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University and also did her Ph.D there in 1994 on Lion Feuchtwanger, Berthold Brecht, and the handling of Indian colonial history. Her main research areas are India in German-language literature, Cultural transformation processes in the German-speaking world and Europe, 20th century German literature, and the reception of the Indian uprising of 1857 in the German-speaking world and Europe.
Vibha Maurya (University of Delhi)
Vibha Maurya is a professor in the department of Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Delhi. She completed her M.A. at the Maurice Thorez Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, Moscow, USSR and her Ph.D at University of Havana, Cuba. Her research interests include Latin American and Spanish literature, literary theory, translation – theory and practice and the Spanish language. She has translated numerous novels, stories and essays from Spanish to Hindi.
Musad Abdul Salam (University of Delhi)
Musad Abdul Salam is a professor in the English Studies department at the University of Delhi.
Janaki Abraham (University of Delhi)
Janaki Abraham, M.A, M.Phil, Ph.D. (Delhi) is Associate professor in Sociology at the University of Delhi. Her research interests include the study of kinship, gender and caste, visual anthropology and gender and space, particularly the study of towns. She is finalising her manuscript entitled: Gender, Caste and Matrilineal Kinship: Shifting boundaries in twentieth century Kerala based on her doctoral research. An exhibition entitled: Exploring the Visual Cultures of North Kerala: Photographs, albums and videos in everyday life showed at the Arts and Aesthetics gallery in JNU, New Delhi and was based on her postdoctoral research.
Gautam Bhatia
Gautam Bhatia is a lawyer currently practicing law in Delhi, and teaching visiting courses at the National University of Juridical Sciences. He also runs the Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy Blog and also occasionally writes expository opinion pieces for The Outlook and Scroll.
Sharmila Samant
Sharmila Samant is an artist. She studied at the Sir J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai, India 1989 and did her residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 1998-99 and the Gasworks Studios 2000. She Has participated in a number of national and international shows including ‘Century City’ – Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, The Tate Modern, London, UK, curated by Geeta Kapur 2001. Liverpool Biennale, Liverpool, UK 2002, ‘Sub terrain’, artworks in the city fold, Body, just to name a few. As the co-Founder, Member of Open Circle, an artists’ initiative for the organization and development of interactive platforms for artists in Mumbai from 1998-2007. She has conceptualized and co-ordinated many collaborative works.
Rahul Roy
Rahul Roy film actor, producer, and former model known for his works in Bollywood, and Television. Roy began his acting career with the 1990 blockbuster Aashiqui, as the lead actor. He then appeared opposite Karishma Kapoor in Sudhakar Bokade's romantic film Sapne Sajan Ke (1992). Roy has been honoured with life membership of the International Film And Television Club of Asian Academy of Film & Television.
Keval Arora
Keval Arora is an actor, staff adviser to the dramatics society at Kirori Mal College, part of the University of Delhi. He appeared in the 2017 film Omerta, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Mumbai Film Festival, Florence Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival and the Busan International Film Festival. Omerta is scheduled to be released in May 2018.
Kumkum Sangari (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee)
Kumkum Sangari is the William F. Vilas Research Professor of English and the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. She has been a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; a Visiting Fellow at Yale University, Delhi University and Jadavpur University; and a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, Central European University, University of London (SOAS), University of Erfurt and Ambedkar University. She has published extensively on British, American and Indian literature, the gendering of South Asian medieval devotional traditions, nationalist figures such as M.K.Gandhi, Bombay cinema, televisual memory, feminist art practice, and several contemporary gender issues such as personal law, widow immolation, domestic labour, the beauty industry, son selection, commercial surrogacy, and communal violence. She is the author of Solid Liquid: A Transnational Reproductive Formation (2015) and Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narratives, Colonial English (1999). She has co-edited several books including Recasting Women and, most recently, has edited Arc Silt Dive: The Works of Sheba Chhachhi (2016) and Trace Retrace: Paintings, Nilima Sheikh (2013).
Mallika Shakya
I am an economic anthropologist with a PhD from LSE, and postdoctorals from Oxford and Pretoria. I work on industrialisation, socio-economic embeddedness and labour. I examined the rise and fall of ready-made garment industry in Nepal between 2001 and 2011, which exposed me to the turbulent national politics rooted in the Maoist movement in Nepal during that time. Later I resided and taught in South Africa for two years and developed a comparative perspective between the trade union movements in Nepal and South Africa. My research examines the nature of overlap between economy and society, including the role of grassroots-level social movements in envisioning a national trajectory on development and prosperity. I have been part of Nepal’s civil society movement on democratisation, especially those concentrating on women’s rights and social equality. Lately I have begun to take interest in the public meaning(s) of South Asia, including issues of nationalism and borders, and its interface with the Global South. Prior to joining academia, I worked for the World Bank and UNICEF for about fourteen years, where I advised governments in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe on their economic and social policies and programmes.
Udaya Kumar (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Udaya Kumar is Professor at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has been Professor of English at the University of Delhi and of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Newcastle University and Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. His publications include The Joycean Labyrinth: Repetition, Time and Tradition in ‘Ulysses’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) and papers on contemporary literary and cultural theory and Indian literature.
Aniket Jaaware (Shiv Nadar University)
Aniket Jaaware is a professor in the Department of English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences School of Humanities and Social Sciences in Shiv Nadar University, India. He is a widely-published scholar with research interests on Literary Theory, Translation Studies, F & SF, 19th Century Maharashtra, and elements of European Philosophy. Some of his books include, Touch: A Study of Caste (under revision for Fordham University Press, New York), Kale-Pandhare Asphut Lekh, A Collection Critical Essays in Marathi (Pune: Hermes Prakashan, 2011) and Simplifications: An Introduction to Structuralism and Post-structuralism (New Delhi, Orient BlackSwan Impression, 2009 (re-print) besides articles in books and many journals. Among other national and international recognitions, he has been a Tagore Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 2014 and ICCR India Rotating Chair, Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Germany 2011.
Githa Hariharan
Githa Hariharan has written novels, short fiction and essays over the last three decades. Her highly acclaimed work includes The Thousand Faces of Night which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in 1993,the short story collection The Art of Dying, the novels The Ghosts of Vasu Master, When Dreams Travel, In Times of Siege and Fugitive Histories, and a collection of essays entitled Almost Home: Cities and Other Places. She has also written children’s stories; and edited a collection of translated short fiction, A Southern Harvest, and the essay collection From India to Palestine: Essays in Solidarity. Hariharan has, over the years, been a cultural commentator through her essays, lectures and activism. In 1995, Hariharan challenged the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act as discriminatory against women. The case, Githa Hariharan and Another vs. Reserve Bank of India and Another, led to a landmark Supreme Court judgment in 1999 on guardianship.
Satyajit Rath
Satyajit Rath was trained as a physician and a pathologist in Pune and Mumbai, but has worked on mechanisms involved in the development and functioning of the immune system since 1983, initially in post-doctoral work across the world and then over 1991 to 2017 as a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII) in New Delhi. Since retirement, he now works in honorary capacities at the Agharkar Research Institute and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune. He also works on science-and-society policies with both government agencies and civil society groups such as the Delhi Science Forum(DSF), the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace(CNDP) and Eklavya.
Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
Paranjoy Guha Thakurta works across different media: print, radio, television and documentary cinema. He is a writer, speaker, interviewer, teacher and commentator. He obtained his Master’s degree in economics from the Delhi School of Economics in 1977. He started his career a sa journalist in the same year and has been employed with various media organisations including companies bringing out publications such as Business India, Business World, The Telegraph, India Today and The Pioneer. He is a visiting faculty member at reputed educational institutions including the Indian Institutes of Management at Ahmedabad, Kolkata,Bangalore and Shillong, University of Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration and Visva Bharati University. He is a director/co-director/producer of documentary films. (The latest ones being Coal Curse: A Documentary on the Political Economy of Coal Energy in India (2013) and In the Heart of Our Darkness: The Life and Death of Mahendra Karma (2013). He is the lead author of Gas Wars: Crony Capitalism and the Ambanis with Subir Ghosh and Jyotirmoy Chaudhuri, published in April 2014.
Ravi Nair
Ravi Nair has been the Executive Director of the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre (SAHRDC) since October 1990. He has earlier worked in the International Secretariat of Amnesty International in London. He was the first Indian to serve on the international board of Amnesty International. Ravi Nair was the recipient of the M A Thomas National Human Rights Award for 1997. He was the Ida Beam Distinguished Lecturer at Iowa University in October 2000. Ravi Nair delivered the Edward A. Smith Lecture in November 2005 at the Harvard Law School and was an international consultant to the Technical Advisory Services Program of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in its training programs in Nepal and has earlier done workshops in Armenia for UN Human Rights mechanisms. He has conducted training workshops on International Human Rights Mechanisms in over 30 countries across the world. Ravi Nair has served on the first Curriculum Development Committee of the University Grants Commission of India for the teaching of Human Rights in Law Schools across India.He is a regular guest lecturer at universities across India. He was a visiting professor at Mahidol University, Thailand for the MA programme on Human Rights for the year 2005. He is a regular guest lecturer at the National Judicial Academy,Bhopal and the Delhi Judicial Academy.
Schedule
Keynotes
The Contribution of Bengali Muslim Women to Nationalist Thought: A Contested Arena
Firdous Azim
Wednesday December 6th, 2017
The late 19th to early 20th century in the Indian subcontinent is a period that is seen to have laid the seeds of the emergent post-colonial nation(s). My paper will concentrate on the emergence of the Muslim as a category in Bengal, and especially the placing of the Muslim woman within this nascent consciousness. This will be examined through following literary expressions by women. A reading of a prose-poem Rupjalal by Nawab Faizunnessa Chaudhurani in1876 will form the backdrop, against which the writings of Rokeya and her contemporaries in the early part of the 20th century will be placed.
The larger trajectory of postcolonial literary studies, as it intersects with issues of gender will provide the lens through which to examine the ways in which women are factored into nationalist thought and/or anti-colonial struggles. The paper will also try to include other prisms, especially of the admixtures within the emerging Muslim consciousness of the time – to put it ambitiously, a sense of Muslim cosmopolitanisms perhaps. The debate about what constitutes the Bengali/Indian, does, at this point intersect with other ways of being, and more specifically in this case, a sense of Muslimness.
Nationalist thought and the creation of new national identities thus draws on wider cosmopolitan interests, and it will be interesting to see how women enter the contested arena of nation-making and the wider cosmopolitan movements which influence and even inspire them.
Intellectual Cosmopolitanism
Sundar Sarukkai
Saturday December 9th, 2017
How can the notion of ‘cosmopolitan’ go beyond mere diversity? What kind of intellectual engagement can meaningfully offer a grounding to this idea? This talk will attempt to show why cosmopolitanism has to be grounded in a true engagement with alternate intellectual traditions. Thus, it will be a way of reflecting on how to think about or use or critique intellectual traditions, other than certain dominant ones, in order to make sense of the contemporary world. In this talk, I will draw from and extend the idea of intellectual ahimsa which has been used as a term to describe the Jaina intellectual tradition and will attempt to illustrate how this approach can help us understand the contemporary conceptual world through ‘cosmopolitan intellectual’ practices.
Seminars
Care and Intimacy
Rajni Palriwala and Ira Raja
Wednesday - Friday December 6th-8th, 2017
If many of the crucial relationships characteristic of the globalizing world we inhabit are indirect and impersonal, it is also true that globalization has led to a remarkable increase in opportunities for intimacy, sustained across and in spite of physical distances and apparent cultural divides. While many such intimacies – be it sex and desire, familial and/or professional care-giving, surrogacy – unfold in the shadows of oppressive political and economic structures, their meanings are scarcely exhausted by structural analyses alone. At the same time, such instances of intimacy are not to be understood in terms of an unreconstructed appeal to individual ethics and behaviours characteristic of early articulations of cosmopolitanism. Rather, micro narratives of cross cultural exchanges, obligations and intimacies invite us to think about individual meaning making activity through which inter-personal and inter-cultural encounters are given shape. Rethinking concepts and ideas of caregiving through the relationalities of care demands that we question many of the dichotomies that have become a priori in social theories – rationality and emotion, public and private, impersonal contract and personal gift, amongst others. This seminar aims to address some of the above concerns through a close engagement with a set of theoretical and literary readings focused on intimate encounters, largely transnational and not unrelated to the political economy of both everyday life and globalisation.
READING
Constable, Nicole. 2017. ‘Familial migration strategies and the cultural logics of desire: a case of Asian- U.S. correspondence marriages’. AOTC 20. http://aotcpress.com/articles/familial-migration-strategies/
Hochschild, Arlie. 2011. ‘Emotional Life on the Market Frontier’. Annual Review of Sociology, 37: 21-33.
Palriwala, Rajni. 2015. ‘Rationality, Instrumentality, and the Affective: Crossings and Blurrings in Relations of Care and Intimacy’, Korean Journal of Sociology, 49.3: 21-38.
Raja, Ira. 2013. ‘Contractarianism and the Ethic of Care in Indian Fiction’. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 36.1: 79-91.
Yeoh, Brenda S.A. and Shirlena Huang. (2015) ‘Cosmopolitan beginnings? Transnationalhealthcare workers and the politics of carework in Singapore’. The Geographical Journal 181.3: 249–258.
*Familiarity with Kamila Shamsie (Home Fire), Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and Krishna Sobti’s novella Listen, Girl are helpful for this seminar.
Transnational Media and the Public Domain
Satish Poduval
Wednesday - Friday December 6th-8th, 2017
This short seminar on “doing minor cosmopolitanism” will have a double focus: to introduce you to key concepts and debates that have structured “public” life in the modern world, and to deepen your understanding of how transnational media practices are reshaping our lives today. We will begin by examining some of the key debates on new media practices (and possibilities) in the context of the technological and political transformations that have occurred worldwide since the 1990s. The next two sessions will focus on what has come to be termed the public domain through an exploration of the following themes:
• Social media and the public interest
• Surveillance and the question of privacy
READING
Wednesday, 6 December
Laura deNardis, “The Privatization of Free Expression,” Global Censorship: Shifting Modes, Persisting Paradigms, edited by Pranesh Prakash, Nagla Rizk, Carlos Affonso Souza, Information Society Project, Yale Law School 2015.
Pranesh Prakash, “India: Visible and Invisible Censorship,” Global Censorship: Shifting Modes, Persisting Paradigms, edited by Pranesh Prakash, Nagla Rizk, Carlos Affonso Souza, Information Society Project, Yale Law School 2015.
Thursday, 7 December
Gautam Bhatia, “State Surveillance and the Right to Privacy in India: A Constitutional Biography,” National Law School of India Review 127 Vol. 26 No. 2 (2014).
Friday , 8 December
Itty Abraham and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “State Power and Technological Citizenship in India: From the Postcolonial to the Digital Age,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal No. 9 (2015).
Populism: The End of (Minor) Cosmopolitanism?
Shaswati Mazumdar and Dirk Wiemann
Wednesday - Friday December 6th-8th, 2017
It seems as if at the beginning of the 21st century democracy has lost its cohesive forces, exposing once integrated political communities to divisive and polarizing populist forces mainly from the political right. Moreover, it also seems like the very notion of cosmopolitanism, whether minor or mainstream, requires to be remapped under conditions in which the presence of right-wing and authoritarian populism makes itself increasingly felt, challenging not only established politics and institutions but political culture at large, and countercultures in particular. To some extent, the current rise of populism can be seen as an outcome of the political handling of the global financial crisis in 2008, following which democratic procedures were hollowed out as non-democratic and non-legitimized procedures of decision-making were established. As a consequence citizens were disenfranchised and disempowered, and fragile national economies exposed to severe austerity regimes. Even in the less affected countries, tax cuts for the wealthy have resulted in an insecure middle class that is afraid of its social decline, and growing numbers of those excluded and left behind. To be sure, populism is neither a new nor an unambiguous phenomenon. What is new to the current wave of populism, whether in Europe and the United States, is that it emerges against the background of established formal democracies. The same holds true for India, where a particular brand of sectarian nationalism has emerged with populist characteristics. In our seminar we will attempt to address and assess a few of the manifold complexities and ambiguities of populism by reading some theoretical and some more ‘applied’ texts.
READING
Wednesday, 6 December: What is ‘the people’?
Alain Badiou: “Twenty-Four Notes on the Uses of the Word ‘The People’”. What Is a People? Ed. Bruno Bosteels. New York (Columbia University Press) 2016.
Yannis Stavrakakis: “The Return of ‘the People’: Populism and Anti-Populism in the Shadow of the European Crisis”. Constellations 21.4 (2014).
Thursday, 7 December: A grammar of populism?
Ernesto Laclau, “Populism: What’s in a Name?”. Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. Ed. Francisco Panizza. London (Verso) 2005.
Jayson Harsin & Mark Hayward, “Stuart Hall’ ‘Deconstructing the Popular’: Reconsiderations Thirty Years Later”. Communication, Culture & Critique 6 (2013).
Friday, 8 December 2017: Populist culture | popular culture?
Olivier Jutel, “The Liberal Field of Journalism and the Political: The New York Times, Fox News and the Tea Party”. Journalism 17.8 (2016).
Subir Sinha, “Fragile Hegemony: Modi, Social Media and Competitive Electoral Populism in India.” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017).
Workshops
Workshop I
Thursday December 7th, 2017
How Not to Translate
Vibha Maurya, Musab Abdul and Anugya
In the course of the workshop we shall be focusing on some of the thorny and seemingly unresolvable questions regarding the translation of literary works. It has often been asked if translation is at all possible; why does translation matter, for whom does it matter (Edith Grossman) and does it make any contribution to national, comparative or world literatures? Writers, literary critics and philosophers, and not just specialized translators, have reflected upon the processes of translation, some deeming the act utopic, others finding it to be a usual exercise. Acquisition of language and its use is essentially a continuous process of translation (Octavio Paz), an issue that anthropologists also face in their writing of cultures and peoples and ways of being for readers who may or may not be of that culture. In this vein, creative use of language – literary language – also emerges from a translational process.
Thinking Cosmopolitanisms; Thinking Gender and Space
Janaki Abraham
In this workshop we will explore the idea of minor cosmopolitanisms by looking at the production of gender in different spaces. In particular, we will seek to understand the space of the neighbourhood. Neighbourhoods carry the potential for both transformation and also of exclusivity - practices that tug at contrary ends of a cosmopolitan culture. Drawing from field work in Mumbai, Thalassery and Bikaner, the facilitator will talk about how gender (and other axes of differentiation) come to be mutually produced in neighbourhoods. We will look at the processes by which newness enters into a neighbourhood, while also engaging with ideas of homogeneity, heterogeneity, and questions of diversity in relation to public space.
Comparatist Emily Apter, has examined a series of axioms beginning with ‘Nothing is translatable’ to ‘Everything is translatable’ and has argued that the tension between translatability and untranslatability, the universal and the particular, cosmopolitan and local, World Literature and discrete national literatures are yet to be resolved. That is why the tussle between the universal (Alain Badiou’s assertion of the ‘universality of great poems’) and the ‘specificity of the autochthone’ (Gayatri Spivak’s insistence) continues. Translators nevertheless make concerted attempts to bring the two extremes together, and despite failures and hurdles, they carry forward their struggle to translate in order to balance the singular untranslatable alterity as against the need to translate by all means. The tension embedded in these contradictions is used creatively by translators.
Fidelity and infidelity to the original, accuracy and flow in the translation, cultural and linguistic specificity versus adaption and domestication, and close and distant reading of literary texts are among the binaries being debated in this field for decades. Literary translators fundamentally write or rather rewrite in the second language a work of literature written in a first language, hoping that the reader of the second language will receive it with the same degree of emotion and aesthetic pleasure as the reader of the first one. The grand ambition of the translator of a literary text is to parallel the joy of reading the original in translation.
The workshop aims at discussing some of the issues of literary translation by first presenting a brief theoretical framework and then taking up specific questions of a practical nature through examples from translated literary works from different literatures.
Speech and the Right to Choose
Gautam Bhatia
Freedom of speech is the right of every human being to contribute to the social, cultural and political environment, through the means of expression - whether by writing, by speaking, by listening, or even through symbolic conduct. The session will examine how and to what extent the Indian Constitution has lived up to this ideal.
Workshop II
Saturday December 9th, 2017
Art
Sharmila Samant
The workshop looks to initiate forms of emancipatory ‘glocal’ understanding where creativity and the imagination help raise a cosmopolitan consciousness. Cosmopolitanism as not just an ideological system of political position or approach of assimilation but as a creative and critical praxis that emphasises on local diversity and celebrates difference. Looking at community based artworks that employ an embodied, sustained and relational approach, reflecting the way in which spaces can be experienced or ‘sensed’. Initiating a discourse that necessarily engages with horizontal relations, of talking with someone rather than to (or at) them.To think of praxis as human potential, a process of opening, of transformation and mutual reinforcement. Encounters of this kind to envision a world, which is comprised of subjects rather than objects and such subjects as equally capable of being co-creative and making shared meanings.
Living and Loving In Jehangirpuri: Filming masculinity
Rahul Roy
The workshop will centre around the documentary form and the art of living, loving and surviving in Jehangirpuri, a working class suburb of Delhi. The lecture will utilise filmic material generated with a small group of men (and their families) in two phases with a gap of twelve years to unravel the documentary form and the political project of hegemonic masculinity as a classificatory project to set up an oppositional category. The geographies of the documentary, moral order of gender discourse and the space of Jehangirpuri will be mapped over time to generate a sense of change that bodies go through and the persistence of conflicts that are both internal and external to those bodies.
Theatre
Keval Arora
The workshop will look to explore the dynamics of exclusion and consolidation through enacted and verbal improvisations by participants
Panels
Panel Discussion I
Contesting Dominant Epistemologies
Kumkum Sangari, Mallika Shakya, Udaya Kumar and Aniket Jaaware
Thursday December 7th, 2017
Panel Discussion II
Democracy, Dissidence and Pluralism
Githa Hariharan, Satyajit Rath, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Ravi Nair
Friday December 8th, 2017
Excursions
Visit to Jana Natya Manch
Jana Natya Manch - NGO Theater Group
The Many Faces of Delhi: A Talk by Sudhanva Deshpande
Thursday December 7th, 2017
Sudhanva Despande will speak about the nature of the city; the many faces of Delhi; and the political geographies of cultural practice in the city. Deshpande will relate these themes to the location that the participants will be at, namely, Studio Safdar, Shadi Khampur, about 6 km west of what is considered the centre of colonial-era Delhi.
Heritage Walk
Walking Tour: On the Indian Rebellion of 1857
By Tour guide, Sohail Hashmi
Friday December 8th, 2017
On this tour we will visit four meaningful sites of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The walk starts at the flagstaff in Delhi University opposite the office of the VC. The flagstaff was the site where the British took shelter when they escaped from the city as it was being taken over by the rebel soldiers. We get into the bus and drive across the North Delhi ridge and visit the victory tower built by the British to commemorate those who died in the different battles that the British had to fight to recapture Delhi. The third halt is the Nicholson cemetery, the site where most of the whites who died during and after 1857 were buried, the cemetery is currently in use though there is great pressure on space. From here we go across to Kashmiri gate, the site if one of the most fierce battle for the recapture of Delhi.
Contact Information
Organizing Team:
Irene Hilden, Lucy Gasser, Anna von Rath, Sikho Siyotula, Praveen Sewgobind, Oduor Obura, Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss, Zairong Xiang
Delhi Winter School Organizing Team
University of Potsdam
Campus Neues Palais, Bld. 2
Am Neuen Palais 10
14469 Potsdam
Germany
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