The Humanities in Ferment: Strategizing for our Times, August 16-18, (MargH collaborates with NMML)
The Humanities in Ferment: Strategizing for our Times An International Conference organized by MargHumanities as part of its Global Humanities Initiative, in collaboration with the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library from August 16-18, 2012, at Teen Murti House, New Delhi, India. Day 1: August 16, 2012 9.00 am Registration 9.15- 10.00 am Welcome & Introduction Mahesh Rangarajan (NMML), Welcome address Brinda Bose and Prasanta Chakravarty, “Introduction: The Humanities in Ferment” (MargHumanities/University of Delhi) 10.00-11.30 am Keynote session Michael Levenson, (University of Virginia), “The University, the Human and the Humanities” Sukanta Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University, Kolkata), “The Humanities Today and Tomorrow: Changes and Challenges” 11.30-11.45 am Coffee 11.45-1.45 pm Interpretation Chair: Michael Levenson Rimli Bhattacharya (University of Delhi), “Reading Lies. In Many Tongues” Rita Felski (University of Virginia, USA), “Postcritical Reading” 1.45 – 2.30 pm Lunch 2.30- 4.30 pm Intellectual Histories Chair: Soumyabrata Choudhury Helen Small (University of Oxford, UK), “Distinction” Jairus Banaji (SOAS, UK), “Sartre, the Critique and the Interviews of 1969” 4.30 pm Tea Day 2, August 17, 2012 9.15 – 11.15 am Passages Chair: Rita Felski Swapan Chakravorty (National Library, Kolkata), “Desh: The History of an Idea of Bengal and the Study of the Humanities” Nicholas Allen (University of Georgia, USA), “The Humanities at Sea” 11.15 – 11.30 am Coffee 11.30– 1.30pm The Political Chair: Jairus Banaji Soumyabrata Choudhury (CSDS, Delhi), “Ambedkar contra Aristotle: A Contention about Who is Capable of Politics” Rajarshi Dasgupta (JNU, Delhi), “Factory Noise: Poetics and Technology in Ritwik Ghatak’s Film Ajantrik” 1.30 – 2.30 pm Lunch 2.30- 3.30 pm Praxis Chair: Moinak Biswas Suman Mukhopadhyay (Filmmaker/Actor/theatre director), “’That way madness lies’: Chaos and Calm in the Urban Contemporary” 3:30-3.45 pm Tea 3.45- 5.45 pm Reclamations Chair: Ajay Skaria Sophie Rosenfeld (University of Virginia, USA), “History as Philosophy for Our Times” Krishan Kumar (University of Virginia, USA), “’Civilization’ as a Concept for the Global Humanities: The Example of Arnold Toynbee” Day 3, August 18, 2012 9.15 – 11.15 am Ethics Chair: Sukanta Chaudhuri Ajay Skaria (University of Minnesota, USA), “Daya Otherwise: The Notness of Ahimsa” Milind Wakankar (CSCS, Bangalore), “Notes Toward a Critique of Historicity” 11.15 – 11.30 am Coffee 11.30- 1.30 pm The Digital Chair: Rajarshi Dasgupta Moinak Biswas (Jadavpur University, Kolkata), “Learning with Images in the Digital Age” Souvik Mukherjee (Presidency University, Kolkata), “Digital Humanities, Or, What You Will” 1.30-2.30 pm Lunch 2.30–4.30 pm Closing Panel Discussion: “Institutions, the Humanities and New India” Mahesh Rangarajan (NMML, New Delhi) Sukanta Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University, Kolkata) Simi Malhotra (Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi) Nandini Chandra (University of Delhi) 4.30 pm Tea **As a part of the Conference, a photography exhibition on The Travelling Tent Cinemas of Maharashtra will be brought to the NMML by Amit Madheshiya and Shirley Abraham, photographers/researchers who work out of Mumbai. ****************************************************************************** Nicholas Allen The Humanities at Sea The global economic crisis has made visible many pressures in culture and society that were veiled by the idea of constant progress in the late twentieth century. The European Union, to take one example, was to the major powers a balm for the atrocities of the first and second world wars; to the minor it was legal security against the ambitions of the powerful. The concert between large nations and small can be traced back into the history of empire. Ireland inhabits an exemplary position in this regard. A part of the British Empire it was a hub of the Atlantic world that opened on to the Americas. A colony with a history of famine and dispossession, the island was connected to global pressures of exchange and trade centuries before this latest recession destroyed much of a national identity that had seemed secure since independence. Ireland’s imperial history was buried quickly after 1922. The collapse of the Celtic Tiger, as the boom economy was known, has had the surprising effect of bringing this past back to life. Now that the story of nation has failed the monuments of an old world order have come back into view, not least because we are entering a decade of centenary commemorations of revolutionary events, events that had their influence on other parts of the British Empire, most notably India with regard to Home Rule and mass public protest. I would like to explore some of the ways in which creative work in the humanities has traced and drawn this global history of Ireland. This history extends to connection with other places including India, that other emerald isle. Using ideas of the sea as a connective metaphor I want to show some of the many ways in which art and literature can illuminate the hidden cost of cultural exchange. James Joyce approached this idea in his reflections in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was first published in 1916, the same year of the great rebellion that began the final movement towards independence. In A Portrait Joyce has his character Stephen Dedalus reflect on the word ivory and its consonants in other languages, as ivoire and eborio. This reminds the young man of his Latin schooling: India mittit ebur. If the world economy is made of an exchange of things, things make their world anew in the sequence of their transit. Small in scale, partitioned and caught between competing ideas of nation, empire and union, thinking about Ireland invites reflection on larger questions of culture and economy. With the humanities at sea in a rapidly changing contemporary world I will argue that our current crisis is a familiar mode with a long and
Explaining Neo-Malthusianism?
Mohan Rao Introduction Politically correct, influential people in policy making circles in the First World do not, any more, talk of the yellow peril, or use phrases such as population explosion, or metaphors like the population bomb. Nevertheless, neo-Malthusian thinking frames other policy discourses, those on welfare, immigration and the environment being prominent ones. Soon after the London riots last year, commentators were talking of the undeserving poor, whose council housing should be razed if their children had participated in the riots. The children themselves were referred to as vermin, who needed to be dealt with firmly, with real bullets. At the same time, partly due to the very reach and influence of such doomsday demographic discourses emanating from the West in the past, and the modified ones today, the elites and the middle classes in much of the Third World remain convinced that the cause of social and economic problems in their countries stem primarily, if not only, from population growth. It is also clear that there is an anxiety among elites in our country about population growth, the belief that this lies at heart of a range of social and economic problems that we face. This belief enjoys widespread appeal in the media and among middle class professionals, including of course doctors. What explains the enormous appeal of this argument? Is it propaganda over the last 50 years, initially stemming from the West, but now deeply internalized in our country?[i] Many of these beliefs are sanitised in public pronouncements, made acceptable, and yet it is undeniable they represent powerful undercurrents of thinking in an astonishingly wide range of areas. This paper, preliminary and tentative in nature, attempts to explain what seems to be inexplicable. Do these ideas stem from other atavistic anxieties, about tribe and race? This too was evident after the London riots when commentators spoke of a Caribbean culture of violence and laziness taking over the streets of London. Do they arise from their evident simplicity in explaining a deeply fractured world? Why are they such overwhelming tropes in the discourse of fundamentalisms of various sorts? Does neo-liberalism provide them with impetus? Why are they entangled with other anti-feminist discourses? How do issues of identity, currently au courant, get imbricated in this? I begin, then, with the almost irrelevant, if achingly tantalizing, question: what explains this abiding and widespread belief in neo-Malthusianism? This question, though terribly moot, is difficult to answer with any certainty, since it involves feelings, opinions and prejudices that are not always easily explicable. How does one, for example, explain racism? Or, in India, the profound hold of casteism, the hatred and distaste for the lower castes, especially dalits? Or, the recent growth of suspicion, anxiety, and indeed, hatred and fear, for anything to do with Islam? There are many and complex reasons, some inter-linked. Is it primarily about with economic factors? It is obviously not only to do with economic factors, although these are no doubt contributory. There are many more reasons, and population arguments also feed into this: the creation and hardening of prejudices, and of fear. In neo-imperial times, creation of fear is a growth industry (Lipschutz and Turcotte 2005)[ii] with sometimes utterly transparent political ends. II I begin this paper attempting to explain the neo Malthusian appeal by examining the astonishing case of Anders Behring Breveik. On the 22nd of July 2011, following the setting off of bombs in central Oslo, this young white man cold bloodedly killed 69 young men and women attending a youth camp organized by the ruling Labour Party at the island of Utoya, not far from Oslo. He wanted to draw attention to the dystopia that awaited Norway because of the appeasement of Muslims by what he called, with utterly no irony, “multi-cultural Marxists”. When the bombs went off in Oslo, the New York Times reported, and everyone assumed, that this was the handiwork of Muslim terrorists. When the terrorist was identified as a White supremacist, the explanations quickly proffered were the familiar: while not all Muslims were terrorists, most terrorists were Muslim. But of course this is equally untrue. In 2007, two out of a total of 581 terrorist attacks in Europe were carried out by Muslims; in 2008, not one of the 441 documented terrorist attacks was by a Muslim. In 2009, there were 294 terrorist attacks, out of which one was committed by a Muslim. The vast majority of terrorist attacks (237 out of 297) were perpetrated by White, non-Muslim separatist groups mainly in Spain and France ( Europol 2010).[iii] What is interesting is that Breveik, a Right wing Christian fundamentalist, has left a 1500 page manifesto entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, an event he was attempting to usher in by his barbaric act. The year 2083 that he chose is also symbolically interesting: it represents the 400th anniversary of the Battle of Vienna in 1683 where the invading troops of the Ottoman empire suffered a defeat, ensuring that most parts of Europe did not come under Islamic rule. It is equally interesting that a Polish king took part in that holy battle. Today of course Poland, ruled by extreme Right wing twins, is seen as the heart of pro-family values, a Catholic nation besieged in a Europe that is awash with feminists, pro-abortion and gay- rights people, together emasculating Christianity as much as the Christian male. Poland, it is believed, is the last bastion of pro-family values that will rescue Europe from demographic doom that awaits it if women refuse to breed. The 2008 World Congress of Families was held in Warsaw, where the film Demographic Winter was screened (Posner 2011).[iv] The film, echoing Mark Steyn’s bestselling book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, predicts the death of European civilizations and the extinctions of her races “too self absorbed to breed” as they are engulfed by tides of Muslim immigrants, leading to the transformation of Europe into Eurabia. This will, it is
Good Reasons (HUG Fiction)
Anil Menon Imaginative resistance. I’d heard the chilly phrase for the first time, just a short while ago, in one of New York Public library’s cavernous lecture rooms. Yet it already feels familiar, as if the phrase had always been in my possession. The speaker had been a philosopher of literature from Harvard, one Doctor Tamar Szabo Gendler. Imaginative resistance, she said, was the unwillingness of readers to imagine morally deviant fictional worlds. I had been so busy wondering if readers could be, would be, so perverse, I almost didn’t recognize the man in the elegant overcoat outside Macy’s on 34th. ‘Humbert!’ ‘Indeed,’ says Humbert Humbert, smiling in that cautious way he has. ‘Coffee?’ He doesn’t introduce his young companion. The look they exchange is apparently an instruction, because she disappears into Macy’s. There is something about her mouth’s appealing pout that invokes clenched fists and crumpled white sheets. Over coffee, I tell him about fiction and imaginative resistance. ‘Sounds like a medical term,’ says Humbert, ‘an absolution for cures that fail to cure.’ ‘Dr. Gendler’s given a name to one of Hume’s puzzles. Hume claimed that a story can do a great many things, but it cannot persuade a reader that an immoral fictional world is right. It seems there’s a fundamental unwillingness.’ Humbert considers my claim. His fingers grip his cup formally, as if he were drinking tea rather than coffee. ‘Unwilling? My dear fellow, an author seduces. What is seduction without unwillingness?’ ‘Let’s not shift topics. Consider this two-line story: In killing her baby, Giselle did the right thing. After all, it was a girl.’ Humbert smiles. ‘And?’ ‘Well, which reader will find that story morally acceptable?’ 1 ‘Trivial. I imagine Giselle has some horrid, extremely painful disease, peculiar to women. Alas, it is also transmissible and incurable. Why shouldn’t she kill her baby? After all, it’s a girl.’ Even if morality was necessarily independent of the imagination, Humbert went on to say, that very necessity could be used to unbutton the reader. I remain unconvinced. ‘Let’s try another. Imagine a deviant, a connoisseur of innocence. Nymphets, perhaps.’ He waited, eyes glittering. ‘Now imagine a story in which a nymphet’s mother knowingly gives lodging to the deviant. I dare you to find it moral.’ Humbert puts down his cup. ‘Yes, readers must be dared. I claim it is an allegory about a God, a deviant serpent and a curious child-woman; to wit, Genesis, chapter 3. Didn’t God know what would happen in that Garden? Yet, millions find the tale quite moral. Imagine that!’ His claim had a certain piquancy. ‘Perhaps God’s Hands were tied.’ Humbert has the air of a man nursing a personal sorrow. ‘What must be done may be forgiven. Who cannot forgive necessity?’ It was a Valentine’s day morning, happy, pure, a premature Spring morning on which anything could be forgiven. His companion smiled and waved at us through Macy’s glass windows. ‘She’s in there supposedly to buy me a card, but I imagine I’ll end up buying her a hat. She’s developing quite a passion for hats.’ Humbert sounds resigned. ‘They grow up so fast these days.’ They do indeed. I remember we talked of other things. Teaching. Transitions. Raising teenagers. We shared many interests, Humbert Humbert and I. Yes, yes, I’ve heard what people say. I imagine he had good reasons. – The End – Anil Menon worked for about nine years in software before wising up, he says, about easier ways to write fiction. His stories can be found in a variety of magazines and anthologies. His novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (Zubaan, 2009) was short-listed for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword award and Carl Baxter Society’s Parallax Prize. [He can be reached at iam@anilmenon.com.] adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Civil War in Jefferson Country: Lessons from the University of Virginia
Brinda Bose A rain-drizzled, splendidly-verdant, sleepily-calm campus it was, just about a month ago, at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, USA – so much so that many of its residents would often laugh and exclaim at its placidity, the almost paradisiacal quality of an island-in-the-mild-northern-spring-sun quite untouched by the rowdinesses that we of the alarming tropics both fear and desire in our daily lives. So much so, in fact, that at a conference on Global Humanities at the UVa’s newly-minted Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures at the end of April, where I was part of a presentation on new administrative policies in Indian higher education (which some of us on our campus here in Delhi perceive as nothing less than an orchestrated, concentrated attack on academia as we value it), it was received by many of the local audience – made up of faculty members across the humanities and social science disciplines, deans and other administrative stalwarts of the UVa – with sympathy and surprise. A few expressed outrage about what was happening at a faraway campus (perhaps quietly thanking their stars for being at the University of Virginia rather than of Delhi). A couple of others (presumably of UVa Rector Helen Dragas’s ilk, as it appears with hindsight) implied in their comments and questions that we in Delhi were perhaps rather naïve to even expect that an university would be run in any way differently from a corporate – what kind of an arcane idealism was that? It aroused curiosity, the Delhi University story of midnight show-cause notices that stank of fake legalese, accompanied by photographic evidence of sniffer dogs, police men and women and rope cordons around a regular Committee of Courses meeting at which its members were to be coerced, initially with veiled threats and ultimately with open punitive action, to sign in favour of what the Vice Chancellor and his team had decreed for the institution: wild and wicked systemic changes whose fallouts, in just over a year or so, Delhi University is already beginning to crumble under. Those there who were far more sharply attuned to grave and fatal rumblings in academia all across the globe (and there were, of course, many of them) knew, of course, that horrific and melodramatic as the unfolding, ongoing DU story was, it was symptomatic of the times we were all thrashing about in. But even they, I can wager, did not in their most vile nightmares imagine that a so-very-similar horror would slam upon their summer-somnolent Charlottesville ‘Grounds’ like a frenzied tornado within the month, just as the last batches of students had slunk away for a glorious summer break after ‘end-sem’ examinations and the beautifully leafy campus was drawing a quiet fragrant breath or two to build up spirit and stamina again for the new academic year to come. I can bet that, even as some of them spoke with pride of the University’s high-ranked Darden School of Business, they did not in their most bizarre dreams imagine it would bring them so much shame and sorrow just as the sun grew stronger on the tall trees and rolling greens and their lovely stately buildings. Brandishing “strategic dynamism” as a weapon in the face of a slow-and-steady academic vision, and ravaging the edifices of loyalty and love among alumni, donors, students and staff overnight that take years of care and understanding to build, a fresh new management-oriented policy of governance has, as suddenly as the proverbial storm on a blithe summer’s day, brought mayhem and melancholy to the University of Virginia this historic June of 2012. And as is already evident from the outpouring of articles, open letters, Facebook posts and tweets, and the massive – now nationwide in America and fast turning global – outburst of reportage, interviews and analyses in the media, the charming, bucolic University of Virginia at Charlottesville will certainly never be the same again – even if, as latest news filtering in gives hope, the tide is stemmed and turned. Just a week ago, two years into her five-year-term, Teresa Sullivan was summarily dismissed from her post as President of the University of Virginia, to the complete shock and disbelief of the majority of the staff and students on campus. Helen Dragas, Rector of UVa’s Board of Visitors (what we in India know usually as a Governing Board/Body), explained this decision cryptically, thus: “The Board believes that in the rapidly changing and highly pressurized external environment in both health care and in academia, the University needs to remain at the forefront of change.” The sticking point, however, was that Sullivan was largely seen as a successful leader in what are extremely difficult times for public universities all over the world, and the one who was attempting to bring change to the institution with vision and grace. This was a very rotten bolt from a pretty serene blue. Bewildered, and convinced that there must be a good explanation for this unexpected move from the Board, the faculty began to ask questions – fast, furious, and increasingly embarrassing. What was revealed subsequently was a tale of Machiavellian wringing and stringing, in the true style of corporate boardroom politicking: hardly astonishing, however, given that the chief protagonists who engineered this coup d’etat under cover of darkness were Rector Dragas and a bunch of wealthy donors to the university, in cahoots with a group of university insiders, some members of the Darden business school of the UVa – fie on them, most of all. (And could Dragas have been better named? Dickensian, according to an astute Facebook comment; one’s literary soul is sated at once.) Farcically enough, an email sent out by hedge-fund billionaire, former Goldman Sachs partner and member of the foundation board of UVa’s business school Peter Kienan by a mistaken ‘reply all’ hit to more people on a university list than was intended, revealed that Sullivan’s removal was shamelessly ‘managed’ by some who are most possessed of those skills