Mythopolitics in South Asia

Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore "Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference"
2021-05-13 15:00 - 15:30 (Europe/Oslo) | Zoom Webinar
In this Theory from the Margins event, we discuss Selected Writings on Race and Difference, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, editors Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore gather more than twenty essays by Stuart Hall that highlight his extensive and groundbreaking engagement with race, representation, identity, difference, and diaspora. Spanning the whole of his career, this collection includes classic theoretical essays such as “The Whites of their Eyes” (1979) and “Race, the Floating Signifier” (1997). It also features public lectures, political articles, and popular pieces that circulated in periodicals and newspapers, which demonstrate the breadth and depth of Hall’s contribution to public discourses of race. Foregrounding how and why the analysis of race and difference should be concrete and not merely descriptive, this collection gives organizers and students of social theory ways to approach the interconnections of race with culture and consciousness, state and society, policing and freedom.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Paul Gilroy is one of the foremost theorists of race and racism working and teaching in the world today. Author of foundational and highly influential books such as There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Against Race (2000), Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) and Darker Than Blue (2010) alongside numerous key articles, essays and critical interventions, Gilroy’s is a unique voice that speaks to the centrality and tenacity of racialized thought and representational practices in the modern world. He has transformed thinking across disciplines, from Ethnic Studies, British and American Literature, African American Studies, Black British Studies, Trans-Atlantic History and Critical Race Theory to Post-Colonial theory. He has contributed to and shaped thinking on Afro-Modernity, aesthetic practices, diasporic poetics and practices, sound and image worlds. He is Professor of the Humanities and Founding Director, Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism & Racialisation at University College London.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies, and the director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She also serves on the Executive Committee of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press). Recent publications include “Beyond Bratton” (Policing the Planet, Camp and Heatherton, eds., Verso); “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence” (Futures of Black Radicalism, Lubin and Johnson, eds., Verso); a foreword to Bobby M. Wilson’s Birmingham classic America’s Johannesburg (U Georgia Press); and a foreword to Cedric J. Robinson on Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (HLT Quan, ed., Pluto). Forthcoming projects include Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket); Abolition Geography (Verso); plus a collection of Stuart Hall’s writing on race and difference (co-edited with Paul Gilroy, Duke UP).

Mahmood Mamdani: "Neither Settler nor Native"
2021-04-13 | Zoom Webinar
DATE: 13 April 2021. TIME: TBA
In this Theory from the Margins event, we discuss Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities by Mahmood Mamdani.
In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors—victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries—based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University and Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala. He is the author of Neither Settler nor Native, Citizen and Subject, and When Victims Become Killers.

Gender and the Margins: A Webinar with Lila Abu-Lughod
2021-04-08 | Zoom Webinar
In this Theory from the Margins event, we discuss a forthcoming work by Lila Abu-Lughod. More details to be announced later.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University where she teaches anthropology and gender studies. A leading voice in the debates about culture, gender, Islam, and global feminist politics, her award-winning books and articles have been translated into 14 languages. The books include Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society; Writing Women’s Worlds; Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt; and Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. Her most recent book, published by Harvard University Press in 2013, is titled Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Abu-Lughod’s scholarship, mostly ethnographic and based on long-term fieldwork in Egypt, has focused on the power of cultural forms, from poetry to television soap operas; the politics of knowledge and representations of cultural “others”; violence and memory; and the question of liberalism and global projects of human and women’s rights. She has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a Carnegie Scholar, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. Her research has been supported by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She taught at Williams, Princeton, and New York University before moving to Columbia University in 2000 where she has since directed the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality; the Middle East Institute; and the Center for the Study of Social Difference. She is on the board of the new Palestinian Museum in Birzeit and is currently working on a collaborative international project for Women Creating Change and supported by the Henry Luce Foundation on “Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence.”

Nick Estes: "Our History is the Future"
2021-03-04 | Zoom Webinar
In this Theory from the Margins event, we discuss Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance with Nick Estes, Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico.
In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century. Water Protectors knew this battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anticolonial struggle would continue. In Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance that led to the #NoDAPL movement. Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico. In 2014, he co-founded The Red Nation, an Indigenous resistance organization. For 2017-2018, Estes was the American Democracy Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. His research engages colonialism and global Indigenous histories, with a focus on decolonization, oral history, U.S. imperialism, environmental justice, anti-capitalism, and the Oceti Sakowin. Estes is a member of the Oak Lake Writers Society, a network of Indigenous writers committed to defend and advance Oceti Sakowin (Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota) sovereignty, cultures, and histories. Estes is the author of the book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019), which places into historical context the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. He edited with Jaskiran Dhillon the forthcoming volume Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (University of Minnesota, 2019), which draws together more than thirty contributors, including leaders, scholars, and activists of the Standing Rock movement. He was a guest editor with Melanie K. Yazzie of a special issue of Wicazo Sa Review (Spring 2016) on the legacy of Dakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, one of the founders of American Indian Studies.

Indian Winters of Discontent: Panelsamtale om bondeopprøret
2021-02-16 14:30 - 16:00 | Zoom Webinar
Velkommen til en panelsamtale om jordbrukspolitikk, den bekymringsverdige utviklingen i verdens største demokrati, og solidaritet og motstand.
Med utgangspunkt i de pågående masseprotestene i India inviterer Mythopolitics in South Asia eksperter, aktivister og representanter fra politikken og bøndenes interesseorganisasjoner til en panelsamtale om jordbrukspolitikk, balansen mellom private interesser og offentlig regulering, og hvorvidt vi kan forestille oss en transnasjonal solidaritet mellom bønder i ulike deler av verden.
Lenke til panelsamtalen: https://mf-no.zoom.us/j/68635543400?pwd=[REDACTED]
Panelister
Kenneth Bo Nielsen, førsteamanuensis ved Institutt for Sosialantropologi, UiO
Bikramdeep Singh Pannu, støttespiller i protestene
Indian Resistance Network
Silje L. Einarsen, postdoktor, MF vitenskapelig høyskole
Aled Dilwyn-Fisher, Rødt
Oda Sofie Heien Larsen, SV
Bjørn Gimming, Norges Bondelag
Jens Erik Furulund, Norges Bonde- og Småbrukarlag
Samtalen ledes av Guro W. Samuelsen, postdoktor, MF vitenskapelig høyskole
Bakgrunn
Siden november i fjor har indiske bønder fra delstatene Punjab og Haryana protestert mot tre nye lover som tar mål av seg å reformere den indiske jordbrukssektoren. Statsminister Narendra Modi utstedte lovene sommeren 2020 mens det indiske parlamentet var stengt på grunn av koronapandemien, og de ble vedtatt uten grundig behandling i parlamentet og konsultasjon med bøndenes interesseorganisasjoner. Bøndene hevder at BJP-regjeringens siste lovendringer er første skritt i retning av å avvikle statlige subsidier og innføre en gradvis privatisering av sektoren, noe som har potensiale til å påvirke livene til opp mot to tredjedeler av den indiske befolkningen.
I protest gjennomførte bøndene sammen med arbeiderbevegelsen en av verdenshistoriens største generalstreiker i november 2020. Etter at vedvarende protester i delstatene ikke førte frem ønsket demonstrantene å flytte seg til hovedstaden New Delhi. Da de ikke fikk tillatelse til dette etablerte de midlertidige protestcamper og begynte en sittnedaksjon nær byens grenser. Kulden og de tøffe omstendighetene i vintermånedene har ført til at opp mot to hundre bønder har mistet livet, men på tross av myndighetenes harde linje viser de ikke tegn til å ville gi seg.
Konflikten eskalerte på Indias Republic Day 26. januar da bøndene fikk tillatelse til å gjennomføre en demonstrasjon med traktorer innenfor byens grenser, og det kom til voldelige trefninger mellom demonstranter og politiet. En gruppe med uavklart tilknytning til bondeopprøret klatret opp på det røde fortet i hjertet av Delhi, det fremste symbolet på politisk suverenitet i landet, og plantet det hellige Sikh-flagget Nishan sahib på fortets høyeste tårn. Samtidig holdt bønder og arbeidere protester og demonstrasjoner i bortimot alle Indias delstater til støtte for bøndene i Delhi.
Grunnet den symbolske likheten til opptøyene i Washington DC 6. januar fikk hendelsen raskt merkelappen «India’s Capitol Hill Moment», og i etterkant har situasjonen tilspisset seg videre. Styresmaktene har i dagevis stengt ned internett i områdene hvor protestene finner sted og arrestert og siktet en rekke journalister for ‘oppvigleri’. De bygger også voldsomme barrikader rundt Delhi for å holde demonstrantene ute. De siste dagene har konflikten fått økt internasjonal oppmerksomhet, med støtte fra blant andre popstjernen Rihanna og klimaaktivist Gretha Tunberg. Den indiske regjeringen har kalt kommentarene ‘sensasjonalistiske og uansvarlige’ og iverksatt en storstilt motkampanje i nasjonale og internasjonale medier.

Kamari M. Clarke & Ryan C. Jobson: "Is it possible to decolonize anthropology?"
2021-01-28 | Zoom Webinar
Since the 1970s, several important critical interventions have been made in the field of anthropology questioning its disciplinary history of complicity with colonialism. Yet methodologically and theoretically, we still encounter unresolved problems of power and representation which continue to reproduce the lifeworlds of the poor and the marginalized in the global South and minorities of the global North as a neo-oriental data mine. Both the authors reflect on the question of ethics and politics in anthropology. Prof. Clarke’s “Toward a Critically Engaged Ethnographic Practice” ‘interogates what it means for anthropologists as “social critics” to be engaged in documenting efforts that not only have explanatory power but connect that power to praxis’. Dr. Jobson’s “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019” unsettles ‘the conceptual and methodological preoccupations of the discipline in service of political projects of repatriation, repair, and abolition. By abandoning the universal liberal subject as a stable foil for a renewed project of cultural critique, the field of anthropology cannot presume a coherent human subject as its point of departure but must adopt a radical humanism as its political horizon.’

Silje L. Einarsen: Sanskrit Memory Politics
2020-12-09 13:00 - 15:00
Silje Lyngar Einarsen will present the paper “Sanskrit Memory Politics” in panel 06 History Writing and the Politics of Memory in South Asia, at the SASNET Online Conference Rethinking the Politics of Memory in South Asia.
The conference is hosted by Lund University and will be live streamed. Online participants must register here before Wednesday December 9 at 12 noon.

Moumita Sen: The 'Demon' of Vanquished Histories: Memory and Myth in the Mahishasur Movement
2020-12-09 10:00 - 12:00
Moumita Sen will present the paper “The ‘Demon’ of Vanquished Histories: Memory and Myth in the Mahishasur Movement” in panel 01 Cultural Production and Heritage Politics, at the SASNET Online Conference Rethinking the Politics of Memory in South Asia.
The conference is hosted by Lund University and will be live streamed. Online participants must register here before Wednesday December 9 at 12 noon.

Silje L. Einarsen: The Mythopolitics of Ancient and Medieval Sanskrit Myths
2020-12-01 11:30 - 12:00
MF CASR Lunch with Silje L. Einarsen: The Mythopolitics of Ancient and Medieval Sanskrit Myths

This talk will give an introduction to a new postdoctoral project within the NRC/MF project MYTHOPOL. The project addresses Mythopolitics in South Asia through a study of contested and controversial Hindu myths in contemporary Indian politics. The project seeks to generate new perspectives on classical texts and their alternative readings by studying Sanskrit myths vis à vis their contemporary political counterparts, and to understand how these myths are expressed, constructed, negotiated and deconstructed in struggles for myths of identity and belonging.

Guro W. Samuelsen: "Modi Magic": Myth and Myth-making in Contemporary Hindutva Populism
2020-11-24 11:30 - 12:00 | Zoom Webinar
MF CASR Lunch with Guro Warhuus Samuelsen: “Modi Magic”: Myth and Myth-making in Contemporary Hindutva Populism
Electorally one of the most successful political leaders in the contemporary world, India’s charismatic Prime Minister Narendra Modi nurtures a considerable personal following. While the Hindu nationalist movement has a long tradition of reshaping Hindu mythological narratives for the purpose of political mobilization, over the past decade we have seen the emergence of a majoritarian regime intent on undermining the rights of minority citizens and suppressing dissident voices. These developments are buttressed by an intensive labour of political myth building. What role does myth and myth-making play in contemporary Indian politics? In this talk, Guro W. Samuelsen will present her post-doctoral project on ‘Modi Magic’ as part of the larger research project Mythopolitics (NFR), led by Moumita Sen.

Decoloniality: Webinar with Walter D. Mignolo
2020-11-18 18:00 - 20:00 | Zoom Webinar
In this Theory from the Margins event, we discuss two works (published and forthcoming) by philosopher and semiotician Walter D. Mignolo, one of the world’s foremost thinkers on epistemic decolonization, and one of the founders of the modernity/coloniality school of thought.
In On Decoloniality, Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh explore the hidden forces of the colonial matrix of power, its origination, transformation, and current presence, while asking the crucial questions of decoloniality’s how, what, why, with whom, and what for. Interweaving theory-praxis with local histories and perspectives of struggle, they illustrate the conceptual and analytic dynamism of decolonial ways of living and thinking, as well as the creative force of resistance and re-existence. This book speaks to the urgency of these times, encourages delinkings from the colonial matrix of power and its “universals” of Western modernity and global capitalism, and engages with arguments and struggles for dignity and life against death, destruction, and civilizational despair.
In The Politics of Decolonial Investigations, Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how coloniality has operated around the world in its myriad forms between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. Decolonial border thinking allows Mignolo to outline how the combination of the self-fashioned narratives of Western Civilization and the hegemony of Eurocentric thought served to eradicate all knowledges in non-European languages and praxis of living and being. Mignolo also traces the geopolitical origins of racialized and gendered classifications, modernity, globalization, cosmopolitanism, placing them all within the framework of coloniality. Drawing on the work of theorists and decolonial practitioners from the global South and the global East, Mignolo shows how coloniality has provoked the emergence of decolonial politics initiated by delinking from all forms of Western knowledge and subjectivities. The urgent task Mignolo stresses, is the epistemic reconstitution of categories of thoughts and praxis of living destituted in the very process of building Western Civilization and the idea of modernity. Overcoming the long-lasting hegemony of the West and its distorted legacies is already under way in all areas of human existence. Mignolo underscores the relevance of the politics of decolonial investigations, in and out the academy, to liberate ourselves from canonized knowledge, ways of knowing and praxis of living.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor and Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. He was associated researcher at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, 2002-2018) and an Honorary Research Associate for CISA (Center for Indian Studies in South Africa), Wits University at Johannesburg (2015-2019). He is a Senior Advisor of DOC (Dialogue of Civilizations) Research Institute, based in Berlin and received a Doctor Honoris Causa Degree from the University National of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Among his books related to the topic are: The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995, Chinese and Spanish translation 2015); Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of Decoloniality (2007, translated into German, French, Swedish, Rumanian and Spanish), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000, translated into Spanish, Portuguese and Korean); and The Idea of Latin America (2006, translated into Spanish, Korean and Italian, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analysis, Praxis, co-authored with Catherine Walsh, 2018; and, forthcoming, The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (Duke University Press, 2021).
Please join us for a conversation on this brilliant book! Zoom link to be provided on the day of the event here on facebook, and those on our email lists.
Visit us at: https://theoryfromthemargins.com
