Category Archives: Notice

Planet Bollywood

The Indian Ocean and South Asia Research Network invites you to its third seminar in 2009:
Anjali Roy (Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India):
“PLANET BOLLYWOOD”

DATE: Thursday, 28th May
TIME: 12.00 pm
VENUE: TfC Bagel, UTS, Building 3 (Bon Marche), Level 4, Room 4.02
Please RSVP: Cornelia.Betzler@uts.edu.au

Abstract
Walter Mignolo has defined cosmopolitanism as a counter movement to globalisation on the homogenisation of the world from above – political, economic and cultural but differentiated it from globalisation from below. But Mignolo’s working definition of globalisation as a set of designs to manage the world and cosmopolitanism as a project towards planetary conviviality has been complicated and critiqued since he first reflected on the relationship between globalisation and cosmopolitanism. Arguing that cosmopolitan narratives have been performed from the perspectives of modernity, Caro Breckenbridge has underlined the need to reconceive cosmopolitanism from the perspective of coloniality that she calls critical cosmopolitanism. Making a distinction between cosmopolitan projects from the perspective of modernity and critical cosmopolitanism from the exteriority of modernity, she conceives the latter as a project for an increasingly transnational and postnational world.

Bollywood, a derogatory term coined by the English language media to refer to Hindi popular cinema, signals a phase shift in the production, distribution and consumption of Indian cinema. Despite their implication in nationalist ideology and the construction of the citizen subject, Indian films had leaked across national borders and were appropriated in diasporic nostalgia narratives in the past. However, Indian Cinema’s global flows at the end of the twentieth century, driven by the new dynamics of transnationalisation of production, marketing, circulation and reception, challenge traditional notions of language, genre, national and culture. Reinscribed as Bollywood, Indian Cinema has been disengaged from its specific location and become part of global popular culture constructing new transnational identities that recall prenational imaginings of home, belonging and community. This paper aims to compare the transnational flows of Hindi cinema in the present and the past to unpack the meaning of global culture and to examine it as an instance of critical cosmopolitanism.

The Impact of the Antipodes on Ecological Thought: Landscape, Evolution, and Sustainability

Friday, 8 May 2009, 1–5pm
Sutherland Room, Holme Building, Science Road, The University of Sydney

Convenor:          Iain McCalman
Presenters:       

  • Julia Horne         ‘Landscape and Wonder’
  • Peter Denney    ‘Picturesque Farming: The Sound of ‘Happy Britannia’ in Early Australia’
  • Martin Thomas      ‘Cross-Cultural Exchange in Arnhem Land: The Legacy of the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition’
  • Richard Waterhouse  ‘Taming the ‘Wastelends’: the dream of the yeoman in Australian history’

From the eighteenth century, the discovery by Europeans in the southern hemisphere of new landforms, species and indigenous cultures prompted intense and continuing debate about natural economies (later called ecologies) on both sides of the world. We will explore these issues through papers on comparative art, aesthetics and landscape; on the rise of Darwinian evolutionary ecological theory; and on European scientific and Indigenous Aboriginal conceptions of nature and environmental management.

Ex Plus Ultra post-colonialism

From the University of Sydney comes a new postgraduate journal Ex Plus Ultra, which means ‘nothing further beyond’.

The journal sets out to question the categories of ‘colonial and ‘post-colonial’:

There was no cataclysmic rupture heralding the arrival of the ‘post-colonial’ nor was the advent of colonialism defined, uncontested or in some cases even as significant for the colonised as has previously been assumed. The very categories of ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial,’ insofar as they subscribe to linear, progressive time, are themselves imperial legacies.

This seems to be an attempt to de-centre the role of the British empire in the development of post-colonial theory.

In their aim to pluralise this field, the editors seek to reintroduce the concept of the national:

Beyond transnationalism
What are the problems with transnational histories? Is there an implicit masculinisation of the global and feminisation of the local? Does a transnational approach simply reinstate the national? Does it forget about the minutiae or the nationless? Is it really new? Are the terms global, supranational or cosmopolitan more useful?

It will be very interesting to see what perspectives emerge from this new opening. There’s an obvious danger. In the turn to particularities, will the only connecting element in this direction be its reaction to previous universalisms? Let’s see how they do it.

Indian Ocean belongers, 1668-2008

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The Indian Ocean and South Asia Research Network invites you to its first seminar in 2009:

Dr. Stephanie Jones, University of Southampton, UK
DATE: Friday, April 3 TIME: 5.30 pm
VENUE: TfC Bagel, UTS, Building 3 (Bon Marche), Level 4, Room 4.02

Indian Ocean belongers, 1668-2008

The paper begins with an exploration of how Henry Neville’s fictional Isle of Pines (1668) plays through ideas of Arcadia, utopia, British colonial ambition, and ideas of belonging towards a critical commentary on government accountability under a constitutional rule of law. The paper then traces how, nearly three and a half centuries later, the real islands closest to Neville’s fictional isle—the Chagos Archipelago—are being defined by a similar interaction of narratives within a line of UK court judgements (Bancoult 2000, 2006, 2007, and the House of Lords decision of October 2008).  The inhabitants of the Chagos islands were expelled by the British government in the 1960s in order to satisfy a lease agreement with the United States government, which required the ‘uninhabited’ islands for the establishment of a military base. In their battle to have their expulsion declared illegal, exiled Chagossians challenged the scope of the government’s prerogative powers when dealing with colonial lands and subjects. This paper argues that the judgments on the Chagos crucially rely on a subdued but at times lyrical, legally-open and provocative evocation of what it means to be a ‘belonger’ of a place. Through a consideration of the legislative histories of this word; through scrutiny of its indeterminate relationship to notions of citizenship, indigeneity, nationality and the language of rights; and through an engagement with broader cultural narratives of belonging, the paper moves towards an understanding of the potential of public law to lend both ethically nuanced and practical meaning to terms of belonging.

Biographic Note

Dr Stephanie Jones (BA/LLB, Australian National University; PhD, Cambridge) is lecturer in 20th Century Literature in English at the University of Southampton, UK. Stephanie is the director of an AHRC funded project on "The Indian Ocean: narratives in literature and law". 

She also researches and teaches more broadly in the field of maritime literatures, and the inter-discipline of law and literature. She has worked on East African literatures, literatures of the South Asian diaspora, and postcolonial theory.

RSVP: cornelia.betzler@uts.edu.au

The Impact of the Antipodes on Anthropological Thought

The Sydney Sawyer Seminar explores the history of how the Antipodes – and especially the Indo-Pacific lands and oceans – has constituted a laboratory for the Atlantic world over a broad intellectual, geographical and temporal scale. Our seminar covers three centuries from 1700 to 2009, and focuses on Atlantic-derived conceptions and experiences within the Antipodes that bear especially on the themes of humanity and cultures, of sovereignty and imperialism, and of environment and ecology.

Session One
The Impact of the Antipodes on Anthropological Thought: Histories of Human Order
Friday, 27 March 2009
1-5pm, Holme & Sutherland Rooms, Holme Building, Science Road, The University of Sydney
Convenor:     Jude Philp
Presenters:   

  • Elena Govor, Australian National University ‘Miklouho-Maclay and Russian anthropology’
  • Shino Konishi, Australian National University ‘The Slippery Native Tongue: Aborigines, explorers, and the eighteenth-century notion of a natural language’
  • Ron Day, Murray Island Community Council   ‘Meriam-le (Mer Islnders), Anthropologists and the idea of rational understanding’
  • Helen Gardner, Deakin University  ‘Out of site: missionary/anthropologists and their informants’
  • Jude Philp, University of Sydney  ‘Taking Torres Strait Islander culture to Cambridge University’
  • Discussant:    Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney, tbc

This session investigates the impact of the antipodes on anthropological thought through centring discussion on the disparate and extraordinarily diverse peoples of the Pacific region. The aim of many 18th-century European expeditions to the Pacific was to glean information about natural phenomena (geology, astronomy, cartography etc). The mediators of this information were the peoples indigenous to the many islands and lands spread across the Pacific Ocean. Rather than a laboratory of clinical and predetermined materials, the antipodean ‘laboratory’ was often treated as a marketplace where negotiation for access to resources necessarily involved the gathering of cultural knowledge, names, languages and cultural products. These chance purchases and notes were the beginnings of anthropological thought here.
RSVP to Katherine Anderson katherine.anderson@usyd.edu.au  or 02 9036 5347 by March 20.
For further information regarding the Mellon Sawyer Seminar series visit:
http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/school/sophi/news_events/sawyer_seminar_series.shtml

Sydney University Research Community for Latin America seminar series

SURCLA (Sydney University Research Community for Latin America)
Research Seminar Series Semester 1 – 2009
Venue: Room S225, Main Quadrangle, Camperdown Campus
Time: 5 pm

March 10 Paul Allatson
University of Technology Sydney
“Star Spangled Trespass: Auditory Dissonance and the Latinization of the USA”
Please note: this seminar will be followed by a Wine Reception to celebrate the creation of SURCLA

March 24 Barry Carr
La Trobe University
“Pink, Red or Tutti Frutti? Where Is Latin America Heading Politically?”

April 7 Professor Consuelo Ahumada
Pontifica Universidad Javeriana, Colombia
"Latin American labour migration to the United States in the context of economic crisis in the South and in the North (1990-2008)"

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Please note: This event is jointly organised by SURCLA and the University of New South Wales with the support of COALAR (Council on Australia Latin America Relations) and ANCLAS (Australian National Centre for Latin American Studies).

April 28 Isidoro Castellanos
Director Cervantes Institute, Sydney
“Instituto Cervantes en Australia: Presente y Futuro”
(Cervantes Institute in Australia: Present and Future)

May 12 Diana Palaversich
University of New South Wales
"La narcoliteratura y el mercado cultural global"
(Narco-literature and Global Market Culture)

May 26 Fernando J. García Selgas,
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
“Significado y Encarnación”
(Meaning and Embodiment)

Other Views: Art History in (South) Africa and the Global South – Call for papers

South African Visual Arts Historians (SAVAH)
Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA)

Colloquium

Organised by SAVAH under the aegis of CIHA, to take place at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 12 – 15 January 2011

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

Other Views: Art History in (South) Africa and the Global South

CIHA has recently been addressing concerns about the unequal distribution of resources around the globe and challenges from post-colonial societies to the older methods and concepts of western art history. At the CIHA congress in Melbourne in January 2008, one of the key issues for discussion was the extent to which we need to re-think the discipline of the history of art “in order to establish cross-cultural dimensions as fundamental to its scope, method and vision”. SAVAH proposes continuing these discussions in the colloquium ‘Other Views: Art History in (South) Africa and the Global South’ to be held at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in January, 2011.

A principal focus of the discussions, with particular reference to South Africa, will be how the study of art from the African continent is often impeded by a totalising notion of an undifferentiated ‘Africa’. This belies the histories, political trajectories and regional differences of its many communities, nations and states. The focus offers opportunities to pose questions such as: What is the counter point to the homogeneous ‘African art’ label? How can art history in an African context challenge traditional western art history with regard to notions of authenticity, individuality, artistic processes, methods and theories? What are the discourses of indigenous people’s art practices, and what is the importance of early indigenous art for a history of art in South Africa and elsewhere? In what ways, and under what circumstances, can objects previously defined as ‘craft’ or ‘utilitarian’ be incorporated into the domain of ‘art’? How is ‘heritage’ understood, collected and displayed? What are the ideologies behind collecting, patronage and restitution, and the use of objects, buildings and spaces? How do we negotiate questions of identity and culture in an increasingly ‘global’ world? What do we choose to study and why? How do we teach that which we choose to study?

These questions have relevance in South Africa, Africa and the Global South. The Global South in this context is a cultural construct rather than a geographic term. It refers to communities and artistic production, throughout history and across nations, which, within the dominant narratives of western art, have been ignored, marginalised, displaced and appropriated. The Global South may include eastern bloc artists largely unknown to the west during the Cold War, items traditionally regarded as women’s work, First Nation peoples in Canada and indigenous people in South Africa, communities whose cultural artefacts were appropriated for the universal museum of the west, and people who have neither the power nor money to write their own art histories. We do not envision covering all aspects and areas of Africa and the Global South, but we shall use the Global South construct as a framework to focus on Africa and in particular South Africa. The aim is to complicate the history of art and the relationship between histories in the Global South and the ‘north’ or ‘west’.

We plan six plenary sessions over three days, with provision for graduate students to participate, possibly in parallel workshop and poster sessions. We invite proposals for papers that address any of the general rubrics outlined above. Proposals should be sent to the Chairperson of SAVAH, Dr Federico Freschi at federico.freschi@wits.ac.za.

SAVAH/CIHA Committee comprising Dr Federico Freschi (SAVAH Chairperson); Karen von Veh (SAVAH Past Chairperson ex officio); Dr Jillian Carman (SAVAH Vice-Chairperson); Judy Ramgolam (SAVAH Secretary)Johannesburg

January 2009

Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences

JAPSS Press, a branch of the Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences is calling for chapter proposals for an Edited Volume dealing with Regionalism and Development in the Asia Pacific Region. Some possible topics are the following:
– South to South Cooperation
– International Norms and Regionalism in the Asia Pacific Region
– Globalization and Regionalism
– Development
– Human Rights and Regionalism
– Cultural Change and Regionalism
The book will be published under the name of the Journal and will be distributed in the United States and the World. The expenses for this project will be covered by the Journal and its supporting organizations. Editorial work will be undertaken by qualified scholars affiliated with the Journal. This is a wonderful opportunity for junior scholars and scholars from the developing world to share their research with the wider academic community.
If interested please submit a short abstract of the proposed chapter in addition to a brief resume to the Editor in Chief of the Journal.
Otto F. von Feigenblatt,
Editor in Chief, Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences
Email: journalalternative@hotmail.com
Visit the website at http://www.japss.org

Re-thinking the Indian Ocean

INTERCOLONIAL NETWORKS; OCEANIC CIRCULATIONS:
RE-THINKING THE INDIAN OCEAN

UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY SYDNEY
11th – 13th March 2009

This workshop will mark the inauguration of a new Indian Ocean research network supported by the University of Technology Sydney. It will aim to work collaboratively with the major Indian Ocean centres of research based in India and South Africa, but it will be innovative in two ways.

  • Firstly it will seek to strengthen the active interdisciplinarity of the field, drawing not only on cultural studies, history, economics and politics but on environmental studies, ecology, geography and the material studies of archaeology and the heritage fields.
  • Secondly it will seek to strengthen an active awareness of the eastern and southern quadrant of the Indian Ocean, namely South East Asia, Indonesia and Australia, tracing these lands’ myriad connections with each other and with the peoples on the African and South Asian shores of the Ocean.

This conference follows on from two conferences already initiated by the Indian Ocean researchers at UTS-“Culture and Commerce in the Indian Ocean” (Leiden, The Netherlands, 25th – 27th September 2006) and “Oceans of Story” (Perth, Australia, 5th to 7th February 2008).

This workshop is the first to emerge from our ARC-funded project that seeks to reassess relationships between colonies in the Indian Ocean area. These relationships were far more important than previous imperial (and anti-imperial) studies have suggested.

We hope that this perspective will lead to a significant new field of research, Intercolonial Studies, based not just on a comparison of settler-colonial experience, but also on the sharing of cultural inventions among colonised peoples. We hope to trace the circulation of people, plants and animals, of commodities, technologies and ideas around the Indian Ocean in a way that was relatively autonomous from imperial centres.

Nor is it only imperial-colonial interactions which interest us, for there were also important sub-imperial connections involving more margjnal European peoples. For example, in the early nineteenth century merchants from the vestigial Portuguese areas in India operated in the interstices of the British framework, enabling them to participate fully in the opium trade to China.

We will focus particularly on sea connections between the land masses of the Indian Ocean, and the cultures and histories of seafaring life, particularly those of the subaltern crews and the lower deck passengers, the cargoes, the stowaways and especially the ideas which travelled with them all.

The themes of this workshop may include

  • Subaltern and creole connections across imperial boundaries
  • Islands in the ocean as sites of heightened connectivity
  • The dissemination of knowledges, especially via printing presses using vernacular languages
  • Comparisons and insights from Atlantic studies
  • The validity of terracentric models and themes for oceanic studies
  • Subaltern people at sea and on land:  stokers, sailors, wharfies, bar owners, prostitutes
  • The adoption, adaptation and transfer of technologies
  • Patterns of religious connections, and ties to Mecca and Rome
  • New epistemologies for Indian Ocean studies and the ambivalent promise of Cultural Studies
  • Indigenous groups flourishing in the entrails of the ‘British lake’ in the nineteenth century
  • Imperial and indigenous literatures:  e.g. Joseph Conrad v. Amitav Ghosh; Wilber Smith v. Abdulrazak Gurnah; Ibn Battuta v. Vasco da Gama

More information here.