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CSAS 12th U-M Pakistan Conference: The Country and The City in Pakistan

Friday, March 31, 2023
9:00 AM-5:00 PM
Room 1010 Weiser Hall Map
Full details, including a program, at: https://myumi.ch/35qGV

Attend via Zoom at: https://umich.zoom.us/j/99822905529

The city and the countryside in Pakistan are crucial analytics for understanding the making of Pakistan and its post-independence trajectory, particularly in the aftermath of David Gilmartin’s Empire and Islam. In that work, Gilmartin argued that the success of the movement for Pakistan in Punjab rested on the creation and propagation of a universal Muslim identity in and from cities above hierarchical, “mediated” forms of Islam in the countryside. Importantly, like Raymond Williams’ The Country and The City, Gilmartin shows that subjectivities, practices, and institutions associated with both “modern” cities and “backward” rural spaces were produced under colonial rule by imperatives of colonial governance, social and cultural change, and politics. More recently, historians have argued that social forms and agricultural practices in rural colonial Punjab were not timeless residues but actively produced through the encounter between idioms of kinship and those of political economy. Further, historical studies have shown how rural spaces were reconfigured, reconceptualized, and reimagined through urban concepts and paradigms in the colonial period. Engaging with this scholarship’s problematizing of center and periphery, the 12th U-M Pakistan Conference will explore the productive tension and constitutive relationship between the countryside and the city in Pakistan’s past and present.

This conference is cosponsored by the Department of History, The Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, Center for South Asian Studies, Asian Languages and Cultures, Institute for the Humanities, Women’s and Gender Studies, Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG), Global Islamic Studies Center, College of LSA, Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies, Middle East Studies, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, American Culture, Arab and Muslim American Studies, Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies, History of Art, Rackham Graduate School, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies.

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

Photo courtesy of the British Library: https://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/apac/photocoll/b/largeimage61102.html
Building: Weiser Hall
Event Type: Conference / Symposium
Tags: Asia, Pakistan
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Center for South Asian Studies, The College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, History of Art, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, Rackham Graduate School, Department of Middle East Studies, International Institute, Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program, Women's and Gender Studies Department, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies, Global Islamic Studies Center, Department of American Culture, Asian Languages and Cultures, Arab and Muslim American Studies (AMAS)

The Global Islamic Studies Center organizes a number of public events each year such as lectures, conferences, and films, many in collaboration with other U-M units. Please use our searchable events calendar for information about upcoming programs sponsored by GISC and the Interdisciplinary Islamic Studies Seminar (IISS).