Identities in a South Asian Context Workshop
Location:
ICOSS - 219 Portobello, Sheffield, S1 4DP
Date:
Friday 16th November 2007
Workshop theme
The currency of the word `identity´ has never been more important in South Asia. In an era of uneven cosmopolitan hypermobility and neo-liberal globalisation, the tensions between the particular and the global, the religious and the secular, and the state and the nation are acutely felt within disparate South Asian societies. This one day workshop brought together international scholars working on South Asia and its diaspora at all career levels. It aimed to push at understandings of how and why `identity´, and its continuing production across different registers and through different historical, aesthetic and political formations, remains such a potent signifier in South Asia, feeding social, political and cultural conflict in both domestic and international spheres. The workshop interrogated some of the different axes through which identities, including gender, caste, community and religion, continue to coagulate in a South Asian context and shape public and private spheres. The workshop also looked beyond the reification of `identity´ in South Asia by pushing at how apparently essential and material senses of self, other, sameness and difference are in fact historical, relational, heterogeneous and dynamic productions. In particular the workshop combined the insights of different disciplines in the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences, in explorations of South Asian `identities´.
The event was part of the South Asian Studies in the North (SASIN) network which seeks to create a high quality research network of scholars working on South Asia in the north of England. The universities of Sheffield, Lancaster, UNCLAN, Manchester, Leeds and York are involved with this network. Previous events have been held in Leeds and Manchester.
SASIN Leeds Workshop February 2007
The next SASIN event will be held on the 14th March 2008 at Lancaster University on the subject of Counter-Mapping the Self: Agency and History in South Asia
SASIN Lancaster Workshop March 2008
The Sheffield workshop was co-organised by Dr Katharine Adeney from the Department of Politics, Dr Tariq Jazeel from the Department of Geography, Dr Alistair McMillan from the Department of Politics, Dr Glyn Williams from the Department of Town and Regional Planning and Dr Ben Zachariah from the Department of History. As well as forming part of the CIPR´s identity research strand, this workshop was supported by the University of Sheffield´s Social Science Research Division and Humanities Research Division, and was part of the WUN Seminar Series on South Asia.
Keynote speaker
Professor Shail Mayaram
Shail Mayaram is Professor and Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Her writing has been on state formation, subalternity and marginality, philosophy of history, multiculturalism and Muslim identities, religious conversion and transnational religious civil society, spirit possession and shamanism, oral epic and narrative traditions and gender and governance. Her most recent writing is on the categories of caste and tribe, the nature of caste formation and the question of backwardness.
She has been coordinating a project on cosmopolitanism and the city. The studies it has undertaken by several eminent scholars are now part of a volume titled, The Other Global City: Living Together in Asia which investigates inter-ethnic relations in the urban contexts of Bukhara, Beirut, Cairo, Istanbul, Dacca, Delhi, Lahore, Lhasa, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo. She is currently working on a book project titled, Nationalism in the time of Imperial Terror: From Pax Britannica to Pax Americana.
Publications include Against history, against state: Counterperspectives from the margins (Columbia University Press, 2003); Resisting Regimes: Myth, memory and the shaping of a Muslim identity (Oxford University Press, 1997); coauthored with Ashis Nandy, Shikha Trivedi, Achyut Yagnik, Creating a nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and the fear of self (Oxford University Press, 1995); coedited with Ajay Skaria and MSS Pandian, Subaltern Studies vol 12 (Permanent Black, 2005).
Workshop Schedule.
9.30-9.50 Registration and coffee
9.50-10.00 Welcome
10.00-11.00 Plenary Session
Chair: Dr Katharine Adeney, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield
Professor Shail Mayaram, CSDS, Debating Tribe and Caste in Contemporary India.
11.00-11.20 Coffee
11.20-12.50 Colonialism, Postcolonialism and Identity.
Chair: Dr Ben Zachariah, Department of History, University of Sheffield
Dr Steve Legg, Department of Geography, University of Nottingham. `Racial intimacy and imperial feminism: Meliscent Shephard's anti-brothel quest in colonial India.´
Mr William Avis, Department of History, University of Sheffield. 'Sixty Years of Post-Coloniality: the Particularity of the Assamese Experience.'
Dr Tariq Jazeel, Department of Geography, University of Sheffield. 'Environmental literacies after Eurocentrism: reading the politics of space in southern Sri Lanka.'
12.50-13.50 Lunch
13.50-15.20 Gender and Identities.
Chair: Dr Alistair McMillan, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield
Professor Shirin Rai, Department of Politics, University of Warwick. 'Narratives of Politics: Gender and Representation in the Indian Parliament.'
Dr Kanchana Ruwanpura, School of Geography, University of Southampton. `Gender Awareness & Action: The Ethno-Gender Dynamics of Sri Lankan NGOs.´
Dr Sumi Madhok, Department of Politics, SOAS. 'Five Notions of Haq: Rights, Gender and Citizenship in North West India'. `
15.20-15.40 Coffee
15.40-16.40 Diasporic identities
Chair: Dr Tariq Jazeel, Department of Geography, University of Sheffield
Dr Rob Aitken, Department of Politics, University of York. `Identity Politics and the confusion and conflation of networks, communities and identities in the South Asian diaspora.´
Dr John Zavos, School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester. `Situating Hindu Nationalism in the UK: Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the development of British Hindu identity.'
16.40-17.00 Coffee
17.00-18.00 Caste and Community *
Chair: Dr Glyn Williams, Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield
Dr Andrew Wyatt, Department of Politics, University of Bristolnand Prof. M. Vijayabaskar, Madras Institute of Development Studies. `The re-positioning of Tamil identity in the new political economy.´
Professor Craig Jeffrey, Department of Geography and Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. `Caste, class and improvised politics on a north Indian university campus.´
* This will also be a seminar for the World Universities Network (WUN) series on South Asia with video link to the University of Washington and other partner institutions
18.00-19.00 WUN Reception.