Tag: history

Book Launch & Discussion | Australianama: Histories of Muslims In An Age of Escalating Islamophobia

Join us for a lecture by Samia Khatun based on her new book ‘Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia‘, on April 18. The book challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present, and future.

Cosponsored by Center for Global Asia, NYU &  The Islamicate Studies Working Group, Liberal Studies, NYU.

Event Details:

Featuring: Samia Khatun, PhD
Discussants: Vivek Bald (MIT), Ishan Chakrabarti (University of Chicago), and David Ludden (NYU)

Moderator: Dina M. Siddiqi (NYU)

When: April 18, 5 pm – 7 pm  
Where: Room 101, 5 Washington Place

Copies of the book will be available for sale.

Wine and cheese will be served. 

About Samia Khatun

Dr. Samia Khatun is a historian because she once lost her way to a mathematics lecture at the University of Sydney. Since then, she has chased truths about the past in Antigua, Kolkata, Istanbul, Berlin, New York, Dunedin, Melbourne, London, and Dhaka. Her documentaries have screened on ABC and SBS-TV in Australia and she has held postdoctoral fellowships at Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and at the University of Melbourne. Teaching in Dhaka since 2017, Samia has been working on a project to decolonize the history classroom at the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh. In September 2019 she will be taking up the position of Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London.

This event is open to the public. For non-NYU attendees, please bring a photo ID for security purposes.

Secularism, Secularisation, and History: Colonial Inheritances and Contemporary Comparisons

Join us for a panel discussion on the topic of ‘Secularism, Secularisation, and History: Colonial Inheritances and Contemporary Comparisons’. Neilesh Bose (University of Victoria) will review recent scholarship on secularism and secularisation in South Asia, as well as turn to history, especially colonial history, to offer a preview of his current book in progress, which aims to add to the debates on secularism in the contemporary by historicizing how South Asians have imagined, defined and compared religions in the modern past. Dina M. Siddiqi, NYU, and Saadia Toor, College of Staten Island, CUNY, will respond, paying particular attention to questions of religious minorities and secularism in comparative and contemporary contexts.

Event Details:

Featuring: Neilesh Bose (Assistant Professor, History, University of Victoria)

In Conversation with Dina M. Siddiqi (Clinical Associate Professor, NYU Liberal Studies), and Saadia Toor (Associate Professor, Sociology & Anthropology, College of Staten Island)

When: April 9, 4 pm – 6 pm

Where: Room 503, 20 Cooper Square, NY

Drinks and canapes will be served. 

About Dr. Neilesh Bose

Dr. Bose’s research and teaching interests include the history of modern South Asia (the Indian subcontinent), the British Empire, decolonization, and the history of diasporas and migrations. He also holds an interest in theater, performance studies, and popular culture. His first book examined the intersections between linguistic identity and Muslim religious community formation in late colonial Bengal, and his current project explores the history of religious reform in colonial India and ways that Indian religious reformers studied local religious practices in the service of a broader universalism. Dr. Bose earned his PhD in South Asian history at Tufts University in 2009 and has taught at the University of North Texas in Denton, TX, and St. John’s University in Queens, NY, before joining the University of Victoria in 2015 as Tier II Canada Research Chair in Global and Comparative History.

About Prof. Dina M. Siddiqi

Professor Siddiqi’s research and publications cover a range of issues grounded in the study of gender and Islam in Bangladesh: transnational feminist politics, women’s work in the ready-made garment industry, the anthropology of human rights, gender justice, and non-state dispute resolution mechanisms. She is a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD), Columbia University where she is affiliated with a three-year project on Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence. She serves on the editorial board of Dialectical Anthropology and Routledge’s Women in Asia Publication Series.

About Dr. Saadia Toor

Dr. Saadia Toor’s scholarship revolves around issues of culture, nationalism, gender/sexuality, state formation, and international political economy. Her book, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan was published by Pluto Press in 2011. A special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly on the theme of Solidarity co-edited by Dr. Toor was published in November 2014.

 

Global Asia Colloquium | April 5 | Gyan Prakash | Co-sponsored by South Asia NYU

The Global Asia Colloquium

A Book Launch of US Edition for Gyan Prakash’s new book, Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point

Discussants: Manu Bhagavan (Hunter College, CUNY), Manu Goswami (NYU), Meghna Chaudhuri (NYU), and Sanjay Ruparelia (The New School)

Event Details:

When: April 5, 2019, 4:00-6:45 pm

Where: 701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South)

On the night of June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India, suspending constitutional rights and rounding up her political opponents in midnight raids across the country. In the twenty-one harrowing months that followed, her regime unleashed a brutal campaign of coercion and intimidation, arresting and torturing people by the tens of thousands, razing slums, and imposing compulsory sterilization on the poor. Emergency Chronicles provides the first comprehensive account of this understudied episode in India’s modern history. Gyan Prakash strips away the comfortable myth that the Emergency was an isolated event brought on solely by Gandhi’s desire to cling to power, arguing that it was as much the product of Indian democracy’s troubled relationship with popular politics.

Drawing on archival records, private papers and letters, published sources, film and literary materials, and interviews with victims and perpetrators, Prakash traces the Emergency’s origins to the moment of India’s independence in 1947, revealing how the unfulfilled promise of democratic transformation upset the fine balance between state power and civil rights. He vividly depicts the unfolding of a political crisis that culminated in widespread popular unrest, which Gandhi sought to crush by paradoxically using the law to suspend lawful rights. Her failure to preserve the existing political order had lasting and unforeseen repercussions, opening the door for caste politics and Hindu nationalism.

Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. His many books include Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City (Princeton), Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India, and Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton). He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.