Public Culture, Events

Techniques of Capital: Property, Self-Creation and Politics in Precarious Times

2010-03-12T20:37:00-04:00

Date

18 July 2010

Location

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Description

Applications are being accepted for a place in the 2010 session of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism. The programme will span ten intensive days of lectures, seminars, public events, exhibitions and performances, and will also include explorations of Afropolitan Johannesburg.

The theme of the workshop is Techniques of Capital: Property, Self-Creation and Politics in Precarious Times, and will be held in Johannesburg from 18 to 28 July 2010.

The deadline for applications is March 31, 2010. Admissions to The Workshop are announced on April 10, 2010.

Visit the JWTC website for more information or to complete an application form. Alternatively, contact Leigh-Ann Naidoo, JWTC Administrator, at info@jwtc.org.za.

Participants

The workshop will bring together a range of top scholars to reflect on the nature of contemporary politics, economics and culture, including:

Arjun Appadurai (New York University)
John Comaroff (University of Chicago)
Ranji Khanna (Duke University)
Jean Comaroff (University of Chicago)
Achille Mbembe (University of the Witwatersrand)
Srinivas Aravamudan (Duke University)
Ian Baucom (Duke University)
Premesh Lalu (University of the Western Cape)
Kelly Gillespie (University of the Witwatersrand)
Edgar Pieterse (University of Cape Town)
Isabel Hofmeyer (University of the Witwatersrand)
Abdumaliq Simone (Goldsmiths College)
Julia Hornberger (University of the Witwatersrand)
David Goldberg (UC-Irvine)
Sarah Nuttall (University of the Witwatersrand)
Ato Quayson (University of Toronto)
Thomas Blom Hansen (University of Amsterdam)
Eric Worby (University of the Witwatersrand)
Adi Ophir
Ariella Azoulay

“The Imperial Modern: Carceral Archipelagos of Empire,” a Franz Boas Seminar by Ann Stoler

2010-03-04T11:38:00-04:00

Date

10 March 2010

Location

Columbia University, Room 963 Schermerhorn Extension. Reception in The Robert F. Murphy / Morten H. Fried Lounge, 465 Schermerhorn Extension

Description

Ann Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research. See here for more information about the Franz Boas Seminars.

“Trauma as a Political Resource: What Victims Do With the Injuries of their Soul” A talk by Didier Fassin

2009-11-17T13:02:00-04:00

Date

23 November 2009

Location

Columbia University, Maison Française, Buell Hall, East Gallery

Description

See here for more info.

Religion, Conflict, and Accommodation in India

2009-11-16T10:58:00-04:00

Date

17 November 2009

Location

Columbia University, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Common Room, Second Floor

Description

A workshop led by Sudipta Kaviraj, Professor of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, and Rajeev Bhargava, Director of the Centre for Studies in Developing Societies (Delhi). Discussion will focus on the role of religion in India throughout its history, particularly the dynamics of conflict and accommodation between Buddhists and conventional Vedic religion and among Saivas, Vaisnavas, and Jains in ancient and medieval society.

See here for the schedule of presentations.

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion and the Heyman Center for the Humanities. See here for directions to the Heyman Center.

Secularism in Contemporary India

2009-11-16T10:29:00-04:00

Date

16 November 2009

Location

Columbia University, International Affairs Building, Room 1512

Description

A discussion with Christophe Jaffrelot, Alliance Visiting Professor at Columbia and Professor of Political Science at Sciences-Po, Paris, Thomas Blom Hansen, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and Rajeev Bhargava, Director of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies.

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life; the Alliance Program; the South Asia Institute; the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures; and the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion.

The Afterlives of Nonviolence: Ethical Principles and Political Consequences

2009-09-02T22:18:00-04:00

Date

1 May 2010

Location

New York

Description

The third meeting, to be held at the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University, will build on the Johannesburg and Mumbai discussion by placing Gandhian thought within a range of emergent research in the theory and history of global politics and publics. Weaving critical approaches to Enlightenment thought with new research in the transnational history of ideas, the “Afterlives of Nonviolence” will consider global conversations that informed and were elicited by Gandhi’s thought, such those between Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and between Tolstoy and Gandhi. The session will map intellectual exchanges across time and space while also returning with a critical eye to the concepts put forward in Hind Swaraj. Panelists will address the text itself through close readings and assess its relevance and possibilities for contemporary workings of notions of rights, sovereignty and liberation. Interested in the fertile possibilities of Gandhian categories, which defy classical liberal political models all the while enforcing democracy and self-determination, the discussion will use Gandhi as a lens through which to consider the emergence of new ethico-political imaginaries today.

Imagining the Public Life of Nonviolence

2009-09-02T22:17:00-04:00

Date

17 December 2009

Location

Mumbai

Description

The second meeting, to be hosted by PUKAR (Partners in Urban Knowledge, Action and Reasearch) and Jnana Pravaha held in Mumbai in December 2009, will bring together artists, intellectuals, activists and media professionals to discuss the meaning and consequences of Gandhi’s institutional and popular presence, historical and current, in the public life of Indian citizens and of India in the world. It will produce a broad discussion about the practice of nonviolence. The recent attacks in Mumbai have horrifically confirmed the city’s place in the world-historical geography of global capital. Responses have ranged from rage at the inadequacy of India’s security state, to the furious condemnation of state-based terror and the mimetic logic it perpetrates, to the shameless obsessions of a news media directed only at publicizing violence in its myriad manifestations. In other words, responses have underlined the fact that the concept of terror structures the contemporary political imagination. There is perhaps no more appropriate a site then to consider the ethical praxis of Gandhian nonviolence. What does nonviolence – as a public, political practice – look like today, as the logic of terror and security monopolizes global vocabularies and sustains the coding of democracy as capitalism? What does the concept of nonviolence do to the contemporary problematics of terror, and how might it revitalize our understanding of democratic habits (too often associated with consumerism)? “The Public Life of Nonviolence” would ask participants to imagine Gandhian disciplines anew, within these emerging twenty-first century frameworks. These interventions will be articulated in formal papers delivered in panel discussion, as well as through art and performance.

A Transnational History

2009-09-02T22:14:00-04:00

Date

16 August 2009

Location

Johannesburg

Description

The first meeting, held in Johannesburg at the WISER and the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa of the University of the Witwatersrand in August 2009, brought together scholars to reflect upon the text’s transnational dimensions in the context of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. One aim of the meeting is to find a balance between the social circulation and inflection of Hind Swaraj, as a moving text, and of its multiple and evolving social, political and ethical refractions in several dispersed but linked public spheres. The meeting will also consider the way in which Gandhian principles have been invoked in African politics by statesmen like Nelson Mandela and Albert Lithulu; the tensions between violence and non-violence as therapeutic political forms played out in the work of Walter Benjamin and Frantz Fanon, for example; and the broad emphasis on Gandhi as a political philosopher and not just as a canny movement-builder.

Importantly, this Johannesburg discussion provides an opportunity to approach the Indian Ocean and its rim on South Africa’s eastern coast as a massive and active public sphere, anchored in a rich print culture of which Isabel Hofmeyr points out the Hind Swaraj text is one important case. While the Atlantic Ocean on South Africa’s western coast may have an equally rich circulating print culture, it has not seen the wide circulation of Gandhi’s text. Rather alternative critiques of modernity might have to be imagined in the form of what Claudio Lomnitz calls a Mex Swaraj. An ancillary of the Hind Swaraj project is an effort to digitize the print archives of political debate and journalism around the Indian Ocean rim in the twentieth century (and earlier).

Participants

Ritu Birla, University of Toronto
Keith Breckenridge, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Faisal Devji, Oxford University
Pamila Gupta, University of the Witwatersrand
Jonathan Hyslop, University of the Witwatersrand
Shruti Kapila, University of Cambridge
Aishwary Kumar, Stanford University
Achille Mbembe, University of the Witwatersrand
Uday Singh Mehta, Amherst College
Riason Naidoo, Iziko Musuems of Cape Town
Crain Soudien, University of Cape Town

Self-rule and Non-violence: Hind Swaraj a Century After

2009-08-19T16:11:00-04:00

Date

16 August 2009

Location

Johannesburg, Mumbai, and New York

Description

Public Culture’s Sister Cities Project seeks to identify pathways for the circulation and production of knowledge in the Global South through translation, electronic publication, and workshops. Convened by Faisal Devji and Ritu Birla, the Hind Swaraj initiative has identified three cities over the course of a year and a half for conversations designed to rethink Gandhi’s critique of modernity.

The Sister Cities Project is undertaken by the Society for Transnational Cultural Studies.

Advisory Committee: Arjun Appadurai (New York University), Carol A. Breckenridge (New York University), Thomas Blom Hansen (University of Amsterdam), Claudio Lomnitz (Columbia University), Achille Mbembe (University of Witwatersrand) and Sarah Nuthall (University of Witwaterstrand)

Co-sponsors: Johannesburg: The University of Witwatersrand: WISER (Jonathan Hyslop) and The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (Dir. Isabel Hofmeyr); Mumbai: PUKAR (Dir. Anita Patil Deshmukh) and Jnana Pravaha (Dir. Rashmi Poddar); New York: Institute for Public Knowledge (Dir. Craig Calhoun) at New York University

“Self-rule and Non-violence: Hind Swaraj a Century After” seeks to mark the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Gandhi’s first book, Hind Swaraj, with a series of conferences that engage Gandhian thought as a key moment in the modern history of transnational thinking and practice. A prominent product of the transnational politics of colonialism, Hind Swaraj emerged from Gandhi’s early political life and travels, and was written in a single sitting while on the ocean from England to South Africa. The text articulated the fundamental themes of Gandhian thought, themes which have most often been understood as motivated by a nationalist sensibility, but which in fact offered a prominent and groundbreaking example of transnational thinking (as distinct from cosmopolitanism or a return to the universalism of classical Indian thought).

While its title is generally translated as Indian Home Rule, Hind did not refer to a determinate nation-state, but rather was an old Arabic name for an indeterminate and vast region across the Indus river. And Swaraj (literally “self-rule”) is a modern term that de-territorialized the concept of political independence by linking it specifically with the ethical practice of the individual, with self-mastery and self-discipline as its touchstones. Drawing attention to these fertile ambiguities, the proposed discussions chart an innovative intellectual approach to Gandhi that speaks to global politics today. Reflection on Gandhi has been dominated by historians, social scientists and political activists on the one hand; and experts in philosophy and religion on the other. The former have focused their work on the much-examined Gandhian political concept of swadeshi, or home industry, while the latter have examined the well-known ethical concepts of ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha (truth-force). The idea of swaraj, and its conceptualization of transnational politics and ethics, remains understudied. Conceived as a conversation across Johannesburg, Mumbai and New York, this project will focus on the concept of swaraj as an analytical lever to discuss the empirical ground, philosophical implications, and public life of Gandhi’s imagining of transnational ethico-political practice. The task of these meetings is not only to think about self-rule in its transnational or global dimensions, but also to create a transnational space for such thinking by bringing together individuals and institutions from around the globe in a network to which each contributes and none leads. It is hoped that this network will continue to exist and even expand after the project is completed.

The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism

2009-05-03T02:13:00-04:00

Date

5 July 2009

Location

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Description

You are invited to apply for a place in the 2009 session of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism.

The JWTC was founded in 2008 as a place for experimenting with theory from the perspective of a global South. It invites participants from across the academic and intellectual world to a creative and critical event at the intersection of theory, politics and aesthetics.

The programme will span 10 intensive days of lectures, seminars, public events, exhibitions and performances. It will also include explorations of Afrometropolitan Johannesburg.

Our audience is a new generation of local and international scholars who locate their work beyond the old model of area studies; are willing to challenge naturalized conventions of interpretation and are eager to bring about a renewed dialogue among the disciplines with a view to a transformed critical landscape.

We encourage to apply both faculty and senior post-graduate students in the humanities, social sciences, and critical studies in law, media, health, medicine and technology.

Building on rich historical traditions of subversive counter-readings in Africa and elsewhere, the goal of the JWTC is to contribute from the Southern Hemisphere to a reappraisal of theory and criticism and to the de-provincialization of intellectual praxis.

The 2009 theme ‘Rethinking the Political Under Late Capitalism’ will bring together a range of top scholars, artists and activists to reflect on the nature of contemporary politics, including:

Achille Mbembe
University of the Witwatersrand
Democracy and the Ethics of Mutuality
Jean Comaroff
University of Chicago
The Politics of Faith
John Comaroff
University of Chicago
The Politics of Law
Adi Ophir
University of Tel-Aviv
What Is the Political?
Ariella Azoulay
Bar Ilan University
The Civil Contract of Photography
Ackbar Abbas
University of California at Irvine
Aporias of the Chinese Socialist Capitalist Economy
David Theo Goldberg
University of California at Irvine
De-Militarizing Society
Michael Hardt, Jeremy Cronin, Ashwin Desai and Prishani Naidoo
The End of Neo-Liberalism?
William Kentridge
The Politics of Aesthetics After Apartheid
Shalini Randeri
University of Zurich
Peter Geschiere
University of Amsterdam
The Paradoxes of Community and Belonging
Sarah Nuttall and Isabel Hofmeyr
University of the Witwatersrand
Culture of Politics After Apartheid

Also including Thomas Blom Hansen, Kamari Clark, Franco Barchiesi, Kelly Gillespie, Julia Horberger, Andile Mngxitama, Steven Robins, Phillip Bonner, Noor Nieftagodien, Zackie Achmat, and others.

The deadline for applications is April 20, 2009. Admissions to The Workshop are announced on May 1, 2009.

Tuition fees have been broken down in sliding categories in order to insure a financial scheme that accommodates global resource inequities.

Visit www.jwtc.org.za for more information and application forms.