Events Archives

11th Annual Global South Asia NYU Conference | Claims Making and Bordering Practices - February 22-23, 2019, 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor. All events are free and open to the public.

(Cosponsored event with India China Institute at The New School) Professor Gopal Guru's talk on Democracy, Caste and Hindu Nationalism will address issues of caste politics, capitalism and solidarity in India. The discussion will be moderated by David Ludden  (Department of History, NYU). Professor Gopal Guru is eminent political theorist and scholar and a highly regarded teacher based at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Earlier, he taught at the University of Delhi and the University of Pune. Later this year,…

(Co-sponsored event with NYU Elmer Holmes Bobst Library) The archive has been the subject of much scholarship, being variously defined as a collection of papers, personal or state-sponsored or some combination of the two, that forms the foundation of historical narratives. This presentation will explore one particular recent archive, an ongoing multilingual collection of papers of the Bombay poets which resides now at Cornell University. Crossing the divide between personal and the institutional, this archive contains a unique set of…

        This year marks the 5th anniversary of the Rana Plaza building collapse, which resulted in the tragic loss of over 1134 workers’ lives, with thousands more workers injured. The scale of the Rana Plaza disaster raised global awareness about the harsh conditions of global fast fashion. In this panel, we bring together Bangladeshi and US-based artists, activists and scholars to reflect on Rana Plaza 5 years later. In addition to marking the violence and tragedy of…

        What do you do after getting a bachelors in engineering, a masters in biophysics and computational biology and yet another masters in neuroscience from one of the most prestigious universities in the world? You give up your job and go on a solo backpacking adventure around the world. Mauktik Kulkarni did one further. After biking solo through South America and backpacking across 36 countries around the world he went on an adventure trip through the place…

  In December 2017, when custodial deaths due to torture became a prominent issue in Maharashtra, the Director General of Police reportedly sent an internal circular requesting the use of forensic science methods mentioning lie detector, brain mapping and narcoanalysis tests. The Indian police began using the three techniques a couple of decades ago to gain information despite the lack of any scientific grounding for these forensic techniques. In a context where physical torture is the norm and custodial deaths…

A roundtable featuring D’Lo, Swati Khurana, Rajiv Menon, Mallika Rao, & Imran Siddiquee   (Co-sponsored event with the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU)   ** SEATING IS ON A FIRST-COME BASIS. DOORS OPEN AT 5:30 PM ** D’Lo, actor, writer, comedian Swati Khurana, artist, writer Rajiv Menon, Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, New York University Mallika Rao, essayist, critic, reporter Imran Siddiquee, filmmaker, speaker, writer, activist The last several years have seen a marked growth of…

Talk by Baidik Bhattacharya, University of Delhi   (Joint event with Postcolonial Colloquium)  Are we really into a “postcritical” phase of literary studies, as Rita Felski’s controversial book claims? Have we been able to successfully dismantle what she calls, following Paul Ricoeur, “the hermeneutics of suspicion”? Since her argument is firmly anchored in “literature” and practices of “reading,” I argue in this paper, we need to revisit the foundational moment of the very modern concept of “literature” in the final…

    Talk by Srila Roy (University of Witwatersrand), chaired by Dina Siddiqi (BRAC University, Anthropology)   This talk provides a glimpse into queerness as a way of life in contemporary Kolkata, India. It looks at the manner in which young metropolitan self-identified queer individuals are transforming their selves and modes of living: through somatic practices (like sex change) to the invention of alternative modes of kinship and belonging, both within and outside of the heteropatriarchal family. No longer hidden…