Session 11 Ravando

KEYWORDS Geography textbooks --> Primary vehicle through which racial consciousness about the peoples of the world was disseminated in colonial India, so that a specific sense of beingin-the-world spatially was promoted, "each person each race, in their own place" Geography --> Science of measurement and description, interrupted every now and then with "unsystematic racialist assertion." The science of Geography "constitutes the taking of possession of the earth and the intellectual domination of space. Lemuria Geo-body Fable; Fabulation; Fabulism Transnational history --> gives a sense of movement and interpenetration, broadly associated with the study of diasporas, social or political, which cross national boundaries, etc; comparison between the contemporary movement of groups, goods, technology, or DYNAMICS/CAUSALTY Basso in Ramaswamy: Place making is also a way of "constructing history itself, of inventing it, of fashioning novel versions of 'what happened there.' Ramaswamy: Tamil spatial fables of Lemuria function as supplements, offering a prelapsarian addendum to the geography and history of the world whose postlapsarian condition is accepted, more or less, along normative lines rather than overturning spatial reality. Taussig in Ramaswamy: Fabulation creates "an uncertain reality out of friction, giving shape and voice to the formless form of 'reality' in which an unstable interplay of truth and illusion become a phantasmic social force. Marilyn Ivy in Ramaswamy: "The loss of nostalgia that is, the loss of the desire to long for what is lost because one has found the lost object can be more unwelcome than the original loss itself...Modernist nostalgia must preserve...the sense of absence and lack that motivates its desire." people across national borders and the transit of similar or related objects or people in an earlier time; helps break down the metropolecolony binary, or at the very least, to make it much more complex; not bound to any particular methodological approach; transnationalism can open up new vistas is by directing our attention to in-between areas. Modernity Histories-- national, global Connexions Globalization Western, Eurocentric Geography Spatial Meta-narrative Comparison, comparative Empire

Thongchai in Ramaswamy: Geo-body of the (modern) "Tamil land/nation" had existed for hundreds and thousands of years, a point of great significance for Tamil discourses of loss. Sven Beckert: Global, world, transnational, and international history have much in common. They are all engaged in a project to reconstruct aspects of the human past that transcend any one nation-state, empire, or other politically defined territory. Seed: Although influenced by cultural studies, the transnational historical approach differs from it. Where cultural studies seeks to find interconnectedness, transnational history examines the process by looking at not just which groups become connected, but also how they become excluded from transnational exchanges. Kozol: Transnational analyses of the history of modernity allow us to engage with different languages of justice and rights that are themselves differentially tied to social structures of power within local, regional, and global contexts. OBrien: "South Asian intellectuals, after the British takeover of Bengal, had no choice but to take up the challenge posed by the attempts of their new rulers and mentors to appropriate their neglected history, in the interests of securing compliance with colonial governance." OBrien: "...in the wake of the Second World War and in the closing decades of cold war and decolonization, state-funded programmes for research and teaching in area studies, histories of relinquished empires, analyses of commerce and connexions that transcended the boundaries of nation states and well as those 'centric' survey courses in Western civilization, proliferated across higher education systems in North America, Europe and Japan. This research and teaching... provided the scholarship and scholars required to meet calls for more global forms of history, which intensified over the last quarter of the twentieth century, alongside the acceleration in that complex, evolving, but entirely ancient historical process, now proceeding under the label of 'globalization'." OBrien: "While the Pyrenees stood for centuries as Islam's notional frontier with Western Europe, the location, direct connexions and contacts with the rest of the world maintained for centuries by Muslims placed their intellectuals (including converts from other cultures in a unique position to acquire geographic, ethnographic, cultural, poltical, technological and economic knowledge about the rest of the known world, and to construct universal histories, long before Christians embarked on their voyages of discovery and process of imperial expansion."

ACTORS/AGENCY Tamil maps --> Demonstrating the vastness of Kumari Nadu and to represent the loss of the originary Tamil homeland; centered on the subcontinent and to persuade the reader to compare the relatively small size of "India" as it exists in the world today, with the vastness of Kumari Kandam which stretched all the way to Africa, Australia and to Antartica. Ramaswamy: Geo-body: In these Tamil maps, the "geo-body" of the modern Tamil nation not only extends far out into the Indian Ocean, but also way back into deep time. To paraphrase Thongchai, "a geo-body which had never existed in the past was realized by historical projection...the agony is visually codified by map. Now the anguish is concrete, measurable, and easily transmittable."

Ramaswamy: Geography: Geography emerged as the master science for the management of discourse about the earth: its vocabulary and procedures came to legitimize talk about the earth and its spaces and resources. Geography emerged as a triumphant science when it was able to transcend the stage where fanciful and fabuluous speculations about the earth abounded, in order to attain the "truth" about the "real" world in which we live. Ramaswamy: Colonial texts claimed to write the "true" geography of India, rescuing it from the fabulous spatial conceptions embedded in "Hindoo" texts, especially the Sanskrit Puranas. The "India" of colonial geography was an abstract, rational, disenchanted place, a clearly bounded entity extending from south to north, peninsular in shape and confined to a fixed graticular grid on the earth's surface. OBrien: "European settlers escaped from earlier metropolitan restraints upon the pursuit of wealth in new worlds, and were free to exploit natural resources and native workforces in other continents under rules of their own making, tempered only by religion and the paternalism of some colonial regimes." OBrien: "Through encounters, contacts, and colonization, the West intruded deeply into the autonomies of other cultures, and permeated the writing of their histories, which became, in large measure, dominated by responses, rejections, celebrations or subtle assimilations of its achievements. This occurred even for Animist African and Hindu societies, who took up and developed the writing of histories as ideological weapons against colonial rule."

PERIODIZATION Ramaswamy: In the last hundred years or so in Tamil India, Lemuria is no longer confined to the occasional scientific footnote, hazy ethnological conjecture, or speculations on the occult fringe as in Euro America. Instead, through numerous essays and monographs, textbooks, public speeches, even a government documentary, this Jurassic continent of the European scientific imagination has come to be tantalizingly installed in Tamil nationaist collective memory as the centerpiece of a catastrophic modern historical narrative about the loss of the antediluvian Tamil past. Ramaswamy: In the late 1890s Tamil intellectuals started to reconcile the antediluvian history of their language and literature with the story of the earth and the formation of its continents narrated by modern geology, they used phrases such as "the vast continent south of Cape Comorin," or "the land that had extended further south" of Cape Kumari, to refer to the terrestrial entity in the Indian Ocean that European science had labelled as "Lemuria," "the Indo-African continent," even "Gondwanaland." OBrien: 1789-1815- European acquisition of new territories, peoples, and natural resources in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa ushered in a new ae of Western triumphalism. O Brien: 1914-1918- "[Western] triumphalism was maintained by reconfiguring Europe to embrace European settlements overseas in North America, Australia and the 'white' countries of Latin America, within the conceptually fluid and ill-defined space of a 'civilization' referred to as 'Western' or simply 'the West'.