Events Archives

    Panelists will discuss Gopinath’s Unruly Visions (Duke UP, 2018), which brings queer studies to bear on studies of diaspora and visuality, tracing the interrelation of affect, archive, region, and aesthetics through an examination of a wide range of contemporary queer visual culture. Spanning film, fine art, poetry, and photography, the book stages unexpected encounters between work by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian, and Latinx artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Chitra Ganesh, Akram Zaatari, and Allan deSouza. Unruly Visions shows…

  In this talk, Meena Kandasamy, Gallatin’s Global Faculty-in-Residence and author of The Gypsy Goddess (Harper, 2014), discusses her site-responsive chronicle of the Dharmapuri atrocity which occurred in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. On one day in October 2012, in response to the love affair between a caste-Hindu Vanniyar woman and a Dalit man, the homes of 300 Dalit people were burned. Kandasamy reflects on the event, explores how one bears witness to violence and the social realities of India’s caste-embattled…

Briana Blasko will share her photographic journey about the making of her latest book, Within Without: The Path of the Yogi. Over a period of four years she travelled across India and Nepal, observing the lives of practising Jains, Buddhists, Sufis and Hindus, and a Catholic priest. Although the photographs reflect a belonging to specific religions, this work is not intended to be about religion; rather, it aims to show the interconnectedness of the spiritual life. Briana Blasko is a…

Joint Event with Postcolonial, Race and Diaspora Studies Colloquium (Department of English)

Taxonomies of identity and histories of activism in the U.S and Europe cannot be seamlessly mapped onto other societies. To think of sexual politics, broadly, is to suspend the rubrics of feminist, LGBT, and queer activism, in our attempt to understand how gender and sexuality get politicized both as categories of identity, and as categories of analysis in a particular society. This panel is an invitation to think comparatively about sexual subcultures across South Asia and the Middle East (and…

  Meena Kandasamy, Gallatin’s Global Faculty in Residence, combines her love for the written word with the struggle for social justice through poetry, translation, fiction, and essays. Her latest novel, When I Hit You: Or, The Portrait of the Writer As A Young Wife (Atlantic, 2017), a work of autofiction exploring poetry, the dark heart of language, French feminist philosophy, and leftist discourse to lift the veil on the silence surrounding domestic violence and marital rape in India, was chosen as a…

  Raga music has become increasingly popular as audiences are drawn to this North Indian classical tradition. The film, Raga Revelry, is an introduction to the centuries-old philosophy and beautiful sound that evokes a vivid range of emotions and moods and invites the listener to transcend their personality self. The viewer is transported to the heart of Indian culture through one man’s journey to create a permanent sanctuary in modern India for this rich music. Vijay Kichlu, a renowned musicologist…

Cosponsored event with The Polis Project   Join Dr. Mona Bhan and Dr. Haley Duschinski in conversation with Suchitra Vijayan, about their  recently published edited book, Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, which analyzes the social and legal logic of India's occupation of Kashmir in relation to colonialism, militarization, power, democracy, and sovereignty, focusing specifically on the years between 2010 and 2014. Foregrounding the voices of Kashmiri scholars, the book traces how Kashmiri youth used music, rap, art, and other modes of cultural production to reimagine…