Friday, February 15, 2019
10:45am-6pm, Weiser Hall 10th Floor Event Space
This one-day conference will be held on Friday, February 15th in the 10th Floor event space at Weiser Hall. The aim of the conference is to showcase the work of graduate students at the University of Michigan who are working on any aspect of South Asia: past, present, or future. The conference features graduate students from several disciplines and at different stages of their career. The participants at the conference may expect a sustained discussion of each of the presentations by an interdisciplinary audience of faculty and students. Professor Indrani Chatterjee, Professor — PhD, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, has kindly agreed to serve as keynote speaker for the conference.
10:45 am-11:00 am Introductory remarks
11:00 am-12:20 pm Panel 1: Institutions, Citizens, and Cultures of Dissent
- Steven Mace "Voices on Walls: The Public Political Artwork of JNU Delhi"
- Farida Begum "The Revolutionary Impact of Female Friendships"
- Janaki Phillips "Dislocations of Ghostly Affect: Paranormal Investigation of the Burari Case"
1:30 pm-3:00 pm Panel 2: Infrastructures, Platforms, and Politics
- Padma Chirumamilla "The Cinematic Roots of Cable Television in South India"
- Vaishnav Kameswaran "‘We can go anywhere’: Understanding Independence through a Case Study of Ride-hailing Use by People with Visual Impairments in Metropolitan India"
- Zehra Hashmi "Coding Kinship in Pakistan: The Register Inside the Database"
4:00 pm Keynote Lecture "Pastoral Power, the Premodern and Pluralist Asian Pasts" by Professor Indrani Chatterjee, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin
Keynote Presentation | 4pm
Pastoral Power, the Premodern and Pluralist Asian Pasts
Indrani Chatterjee, Professor, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin
The talk revisits the place of hegemonic households in the exercise of specific aspects of governmentality that are missing from Foucault's discussion of the term.
Professor Chatterjee writes: "I have taught young people in three continents, and over two decades. My teaching interests have evolved to keep pace with my own travels in time. So the courses I have taught include Slavery and South Asian History, the Gender of South Asian pasts, Early Modernity in the subcontinent, and The Power of Performance.
Recently, I find myself drawn simultaneously to both intellectual and economic histories of the subcontinent. In particular, I am interested in the ways in which wealth travelled between and within monastic lineages in the past. Having worked on the ways in which monastic governmentality was forgotten in Indian historiography by the early decades of the twentieth century, I am currently revisiting the costs of such forgetting to women's wealth in eastern India. In brief, I am interested in excavating a new history of wealth."
