Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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he intimacy, the quality of honesty, and of realization possible was more illuminating and pleasurable and painful than a thousand conventional conversations... These were not rehearsals of already written scripts, but loosely organized, intense meetings where nothing precise had to happen. This I guess was almost the opposite of education. There was no information to be conveyed, nothing which had to be put into the participants, only ideas which might be discovered in a collective experiment. Workshops groups of people who met in the hope of discovering something which might be of use can be a powerful tool for emotional contact and learning, and can be adapted in many ways. Hanif Kureshi, from Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics (2002)
On Workshops
How then do we engage the law, without falling into the trap of liberalism? Can we afford to completely disengage with liberal rights? At what cost do we move beyond the legalese of human rights? Does speaking liberal language operate as strategy for peoples movements, or is it co-option of it? And as Wendy Brown enquires: how might the paradoxical elements of the struggle for rights in an emancipatory context articulate a field of justice beyond that which we cannot not want? one way to articulate a field of justice beyond that which we cannot not want is to document practices and performances of protest- as Resistance, Solidarity and Insurgency in the post colony that are deeply committed to talking Human Rights but beyond and without the disciplined captivity of law, modernity and markets. Discussions at this workshop would aim at displacing the centrality of the law in giving meaning to the ideas of justice and its liberal vicissitudes and to chart the limits of the legal archive. The beyond metaphor is not a disengagement with the law, but one which allows us to delimit laws habitus. This workshop chooses to focus on the materiality of subaltern protests by travelling through various forms of re/presentations of peoples, spaces, their resistances and acts of solidarity and insurgency in the post colony that dont require the laws scaffolding to erect its articulation of rights. The workshop hopes to draw on the diversity of experiences of its participants to engage in a counter-topographic mapping of protest practices by old and new subalterns, particularly across certain locations in the conventional North, the Antipodes, Latin Americas, Africa and South and South East Asia. Along with being a project in building transnational solidarity through activist scholarship, it will also build an archive of images/ representations of performances of protest to put theory under the scanner of small voice[s] of history.
uman Rights, liberalisms most potent aphrodisiac, is an inescapable concern for many of us in the academy, despite our critical consciousness about the cruelly liberal genealogy of its idea and practice. For us human rights remains, to invoke Gayatri Spivak: that which we cannot not want. This consciousness has constituted each of us (and our subterranean others) as desiring nationalist, heterosexual and entrepreneurial subjects to whom liberalism offers means like the market, secularism, merit, multiculturalism- and of course Human Rights Law- as remedies for inequality, subordination, exclusion and annihilation.
DAY 1 Wednesday, September 14, 2011 @ Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat
9.30-10.30 am 10.30-11.00 am 11.00am-1.00pm Registration and Breakfast Inauguration and introduction to workshop Opening Plenary: WHAT IS INSURRECTIONARY KNOWLEDGE?
Moderator: Sunalini Kumar, University of Delhi 1.00-2.00pm 2.00 4.30pm Session 1A: Lunch Parallel Sessions THEATERS OF RESISTANCE Discussant: Nita Kumar, University of Delhi RACHMI DIYAH LARASATI; ALEJANDRO JAVIER VIVEROS ESPINOSA; TRINA NILEENA BANERJEE; SWATI PAL Session 1B: UNRULY MARGINS Discussant: Rukmini Sen, Ambedkar University MEERA JENSY MOORKOTH; SAPTARSHI MANDAL; JATINDER SINGH; PHILIP VINOD PEACOCK 4.30-5.00pm 5.00-6.30pm Tea / Coffee and Break Documentary Film: MULLAITIVU SAGA: EXPLORING THE TEXTURES OF A PLANNED GENOCIDE directed by S.Someetharan/ followed by Q&A with the director Music: IMPHAL TALKIES - Akhu, Sachin, Riki and Raju Dinner
6.30-8.00pm 8.00-9.00pm
Schedule
Participants: B.S. Chimni, Jawaharlal Nehru University Vinay Lal, University of California, Los Angeles Saroj Giri, University of Delhi Pankaj Jha, University of Delhi Costas Douzinas, University of London [via video conference] Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley [correspondence]
DAY 2 Thursday, September 15, 2011 @ Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat
8.30am-9.30am 9:30 11:00am Breakfast Keynote Lecture: Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University, USA HOMONATIONALISM GONE VIRAL: TRANSMISSION, AFFECT, ASSEMBLAGE Respondent: Ashley Tellis, Jesus & Mary College, University of Delhi 11:15am1:45pm Session 2A: Parallel Sessions THE (IN)JUSTICE OF RIGHTS Discussant: Rohee Dasgupta, Jindal School of International Affairs M. MOHSIN ALAM; DIANNE OTTO; DIANA SANKEY; VANJA HAMZIC Session 2B: JUSTICE IN THE PERFORMATIVE Discussant: Shohini Ghosh, Jamia Millia Islamia University BISHAKHA DATTA; LAWRENCE LIANG; ANANDA BREED; NAMITA MALHOTRA 1.45-2.45pm 2:455:15pm Session 2C: Lunch Parallel Sessions THE POLITICS OF POLITICS Discussant: Ajay Gudavarthi, Jawaharlal Nehru University JARED LIST; KANCHANA MAHADEVAN; ASHLEY TELLIS; PRAEM HIDAM Session 2D: INVERTING VULNERABILITIES Discussant: Sarada Balagopalan, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies LISA KELLY; RAHUL RAO; RENU ADDLAKHA; SUROOPA MUKHERJEE 5.15-6.00pm 6.00-7.00pm 7.00-8.00pm 8.00-9.30pm Tea/ Coffee and Break Contemporary Dance: LANGKASUKA: POLITICS OF MEMORY by Zubin Mohamad Music: THE FORGOTTEN TRADITION: ITPAS SONGS OF PROTEST by Sumangala Damodaran Dinner
DAY 3 Friday, September 16, 2011 @ Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat and Alliance Franaise de Delhi
8.30-9.30am 9.3011.00am Breakfast BOOK TALKS (presented in collaboration with Oxford University Press India) Rahul Rao, School of Africal and Oriental Studies, University of London THIRD WORLD PROTEST: BETWEEN HOME AND THE WORLD (OUP, 2010) Anupama Roy, Jawaharlal Nehru University MAPPING CITIZENSHIP IN INDIA (OUP, 2011) Rajshree Chandra, Janaki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi KNOWLEDGE AS PROPERTY: ISSUES IN THE MORAL GROUNDING AS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS (OUP, 2010) Discussant: Madhulika Banerjee, University of Delhi 11:15am1:45pm Session 3A: Parallel Sessions VOCABULARIES OF REVOLUTION Discussant: Bimol Akoijam, Jawaharlal Nehru University UDAY CHANDRA; SAMRAT SENGUPTA; JHUMA SEN; RITA SINHA Session 3B: BODIES IN PROTEST Discussant: Lakshmi Arya, Jindal Global Law School SHREEMA NINGOMBAM; PREETHY ATHREYA; LIPIKA KAMRA; IHEDIWA CHIMEE 1.45-2.30pm 2.30-3.30pm 4.00pm 6.30-9.00pm Lunch Music: Adi Dharm Samajh Leave for Delhi Film Screenings at Alliance Franaise de Delhi Film: ARRIVAL directed by Mani Kaul (In memoriam) Film: STHANIYA SAMBAAD directed by Arjun Gourisaria and Moinak Biswas/ Introduced by: Brinda Bose, University of Delhi/ Q&A with director moderated by: Prasanta Chakravarty, University of Delhi 9.00-10.00pm 10.00pm Dinner Back to JGU campus
Schedule
Participants: Ileana Rodriguez, Ohio State University Shail Mayaram, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies Moderator: Nivedita Menon, Jawaharlal Nehru University 5.00-5.30pm 5.30-6.00pm 6.30-8.30pm Tea/ Coffee Closing Comments by Conveners Poetry: A FEAST OF FLESH by N.D. Rajkumar Third Theater: SOAKED, STRETCHED AND SUBMERGED: A CHOREOPOEM performed by Surjit Nongmeikapam, Gautam Bajoria and Parnab Mukherjee 8.30-9.30pm Closing Dinner
EXHIBITIONS
@JGLS: September 14-17, 2011 FAULTLINES, FREAKS AND FRENEMIES: PROTEST ART BETWEEN IDENTITY AND ALTERITY Curated by: V.K. Sularia / Visual Ark @Instituto Cervantes: September 17-October 16, 2011 UNFRAMED: A MINOR MEMORABILIA COLLECTION FROM THE DAMNED Curated by: Parnab Mukherjee
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Keynote
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Participants:
Plenaries
B.S. Chimni, Jawaharlal Nehru University Vinay Lal, University of California, Los Angeles Saroj Giri, University of Delhi Pankaj Jha, University of Delhi Costas Douzinas, University of London [via video conference] Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley [correspondence] Moderator: Sunalini Kumar, University of Delhi
Saturday, September 17, 2011 3.30 5.00pm/ Instituto Cervantes, New Delhi
Closing Plenary: POSTCOLONIAL PEREGRINATIONS: REFLECTIONS ON SUBALTERN STUDIES IN SOUTH ASIA AND LATIN AMERICA
Where is the here and now and where will be the then and there of subaltern studies? Where will a critical stocktaking of the future of subaltern studies in South Asia and Latin America take us? What are the new directions in which subaltern studies scholarship has moved transnationally? Has subaltern studies outlived its relevance? That is, has its very success in reworking the idea of subjectivity made it redundant because an un-problematized notion of the subject no longer exists against which the subaltern can be counter-posed? How else to explain the end of Subaltern Studies Volumes from the original collective?
Participants:
Ileana Rodriguez, Ohio State University Shail Mayaram, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies Moderator: Nivedita Menon, Jawaharlal Nehru University
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Session 1A:
Session 2A:
Parallel Panels
This panel explores theatre and theatricality as cultural resistance. Examples span the globe, from agents of pain and shame on the Indian stage, to cultural practices in micro-peripheral islands within the territories of the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, to a reading of the performance of sabotage in the figure of the Indian Ladino in Latin America, to the revolutionary genealogies and current political deployments of agit prop theater. RACHMI DIYAH LARASATI: Dancing Women and New Borders: A Response to the Global Network of Anti-Terrorism in Southeast Asia ALEJANDRO JAVIER VIVEROS ESPINOSA: Sabotage and the Indian ladino: Towards a Judicial Reflective Modulation of Colonial Latin America TRINA NILEENA BANERJEE: Antigones Claim? Political Extremity and Performance of Pain by Women on the Indian Stage SWATI PAL: From Russia With Love: Agit Prop in and as Theater
If universalism and particularism are both vulnerable to charges of essentialism, what kinds of critical engagement with the language of rights can lead to emancipatory goals? This panel draws upon fieldwork and political commitments to feminism, LGBT, food sovereignty and cultural rights, their links to protest practices and instances of engagement with rights and justice, and beyond the language of law. M. MOHSIN ALAM: Religion versus Rights: Why We are wrong about Defamation of Religions DIANNE OTTO: Pursuing Gender Pluralism through International Human Rights Law: Promise and Limits DIANA SANKEY: Challenging liberal rights: the work of the Food Sovereignty Movement VANJA HAMZIC: Unlearning Human Rights and False Grand Dichotomies: Indonesian Archipelagic Selves beyond Sexual/Gender Universality
Session 2B:
Session 1B:
This panel uses the analytic tools of performance and performativity to analyze art, rituals or ordinary life, with topics ranging from the performance of power by gacaca courts in Rwanda, to the cinematic imaginations of Constitutionalism, to the Pink Panty campaign and the possibilities of protest in the age of digitized citizenship. BISHAKHA DATTA: 3P: Perform, Protest, Play LAWRENCE LIANG: Awaras Constitutional Amendment: Love and Justice in Cinematic Courtrooms ANANDA BREED: Juridical Performatives: Public versus Hidden Transcripts NAMITA MALHOTRA: Performing Citizenship in the Information State: Downloading the State
While oppression based on caste, class, tribe, and disability are not new, these are among the more recent categories to be translated into the formal language of rights. The papers in this panel describe how ongoing attempts to contain claims and deprivations within the four corners of the law are frustrated by the unruly margins of experience. MEERA JENSY MOORKOTH: Registers of Property and Spaces of Resistance: Adivasi Politics in Kerala SAPTARSHI MANDAL: Legal Discourse and the Normalization of Manual Scavenging in India JATINDER SINGH: Excavating the Political Economy of SC/ST (PoA) Act, 1989: Dissenting voices and narratives from the field PHILIP VINOD PEACOCK: Convert, Contest, Protest: The Contours and Politics of Dalit Conversion Movements
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Session 2C:
What is politics? This panel examines particular conceptions of politics (politics as power, solidarity, morality, democracy, or enmity) as well as possible conceptual opposites (politics against law, theory, or the dissident body). In order to re-evaluate the possibilities of politics, panelists draw from a variety of theoretical sources (Kant, Foucault, Chatterjee Butler, Ake, Spivak), as well as events (e.g., the death of Ramachandra Siras), and cinematic texts from Hollywood and Bollywood. JARED LIST: Voices from the Periphery: Democracy and Abuse in the Global Context KANCHANA MAHADEVAN: The Enlightenment to Resistance: From Foucault to Chatterjee ASHLEY TELLIS: Re-configuring languages of Protest: Re-writing Human Rights through Culture PRAEM HIDAM: Love of life and Dangers of Law in Sharmilas Fasting
Session 3A:
In India the discourse of revolution has typically been cast by all sides in the frames of public spectacle and public disorder, of violence and counter-violence. This panel re-situates three revolutionary movements modern Maoist-adivasi encounter, and the Naxalbari and JP movements of the 1970s in the less familiar frames of everyday life, intimate memoirs, and poetry, casting each in unfamiliar light particular idioms and comparative insight. UDAY CHANDRA: Remaking Leviathan: Rulers, Civilizers, and Rebels in Historical and Contemporary Jharkhand SAMRAT SENGUPTA: What is an outside? What is a revolution without outside? What is an outside without revolution? JHUMA SEN: Law, Violence and Mass Movements: Re-presenting Resistance in Chhattisgarh
Session 2D:
RITA SINHA: Bihar 1974: The Poetry of Revolution: a very personal testament
Session 3B:
Recent headlines concerning children in disaster-stricken Haiti, human trafficking, homophobia in Uganda, and the Anniversary of the Bhopal tragedy, each mobilize familiar narratives about vulnerability and victimhood. The scholars on this panel go beyond media accounts, drawing upon fieldwork to de-familarize each of these narratives and restoring to them some of their complexity. LISA KELLY: A Child of the Nation RAHUL RAO: The Location of Homophobia RENU ADDLAKHA: Disability Discourse Beyond the Law: Is it a Possibility? SUROOPA MUKHERJEE: Literatures that Emerge from Within Social Movements: The Case of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy
Tactics of resistance mobilize the body in various states of dress, undress, and undoing. This panel brings into conversation various case studies of the uses of the gendered body in protest: the use of the garment called the Phanek, uses of nudity in India and Nigeria, the liminality of the dancers body and the limit case of suicide terrorism. SHREEMA NINGOMBAM: The Politics of Phanek in Protest- An Interpretation of Its Symbolic Meaning PREETHY ATHREYA: A Body? Free from Protest. LIPIKA KAMRA: Embodied Resistance: Theorizing Female Suicide Bombers IHEDIWA CHIMEE: Our bodies have won the victory: Interrogating Nudity and Human Rights Protests in Nigeria
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Saturday, September 17, 2011 11:00am 1:30pm/ Instituto Cervantes, New Delhi
Session 4A:
Dissidents find themselves in unexpected locations and subject positions; people in various locations sometimes find themselves in the unexpected position of being dissidents. This panel will describe disparate locations of dissidence, ranging from the tactical spaces occupied by human rights organizations during the War on Terror, to mechanisms of social vigilance and justice that were instituted in the military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, to the dilemmas of loitering bodies in gendered public space in Mumbai. GABRIELA GONZALEZ: The Enemy Within: Othering and Surveilling during authoritarian regimes in the Southern Cone AVIVA STAHL: Between a Rock and Hard Place: Cageprisoners and the Double-Edged Nature of Human Rights Discourse SIDDHARTH NARRAIN: Sedition Laws and Strategies of Resistance SHILPA PHADKE: Loitering Bodies: Some Dilemmas in Gendered Public Space
Session 4B:
The City has emerged as a major site for investigation of contemporary concepts of sovereignty, protest and citizenship. This panel brings into conversation scholars who are mapping the dilemmas and discontinuities of development in urban settings throughout the Global South, from Delhi to Luanda, from Kolkata to Bogota. GARGA CHATTERJEE: Necropolitics and the Stubborn: Stories of Death and Dying, Between Homestead and the Divine SUNALINI KUMAR: Chronicle of a Death Untold: The Lethal Geographies of Delhis Periphery LUIS ESLAVA: I feel like a dog with the tail between its legs: The Limits of Protest and the Pedagogy of Deception CAIO SIMES DE ARAJO: Broken houses, Insurgent voices: the right to the city, human rights and the politics of the governed in Luanda, Angola
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emerged at the commencement of the Indian Republic in the context of the partition, show that the question of legal membership remained a vexed one. Both the contest over citizenship and its resolution were embedded in processes of state-formation and institutional ordering, as seen in the ways in which institutions perceived, interpreted, and eventually resolved their respective powers of decision-making over citizenship matters.
THIRD WORLD PROTEST: BETWEEN HOME AND THE WORLD (OUP, 2010)
If boundaries protect us from threats, how should we think about the boundaries of states in a world where threats to human rights emanate from both outside the state and the state itself? Arguing that attitudes towards boundaries are premised on assumptions about the locus of threats to vital interests, Rahul Rao digs beneath two major normative orientations towards boundaries-cosmopolitanism and nationalismwhich structure thinking on questions of public policy and identity. Insofar as the Third World is concerned, hegemonic versions of both orientations are underpinned by simplistic imageries of threat. In the cosmopolitan gaze, political and economic crises in the Third World are attributed mainly to factors internal to the Third World state with the international playing the role of heroic saviour. In Third World nationalist imagery, the international is portrayed as a realm of neoimperialist predation from which the domestic has to be secured. Both images capture widely held intuitions about the sources of threats to human rights, but each by itself provides a resolutely partial inventory of these threats. By juxtaposing critical accounts of both discourses, Rao argues that protest sensibilities in the current conjuncture must be critical of hegemonic variants of both cosmopolitanism and nationalism.
Book Talks
Films
Five boys on a roadside perch make desultory observations on the goings on, losing no chance to confuse Atin. Two old men, original immigrants, sit at the local grocery philosophizing on commodities, life and desire. As Atin, along with his only friend Dipankar, sets out in search of Ananya, and the two thieves embark on an increasingly absurd journey to try and sell the plait, the story travels from the colony of the day to the neon districts of the night, and then to the ghostly New Town under construction, tracing out the map of a city through realism and delirium. Somewhere along the path, Dipankar tells Atin about Ananyas family buying an apartment in the new building that is about to raze their colony tenements to the ground. By daybreak, they are on the eastern fringes of the new Calcutta. Draped in the midnight fog stands Mr. Paul, the visionary land shark, whose demolition team is warming up for action at Deshbandhu colony. As his house gets destroyed in the small hours of the morning, Atin comes and greets Mr. Paul. Introduced by: Brinda Bose, University of Delhi Q&A with filmmaker moderated by: Prasanta Chakravarty, University of Delhi
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Wednesday, September 14, 2011 6.30 8.00pm/ JGLS Music: IMPHAL TALKIES Imphal Talkies is a Delhi based music band from Imphal, Manipur. The band mostly performs protest songs against AFSPA, and atrocities towards minorities. The band has released its debut album Tidim Road in early 2009. They sing both in English and Manipuri. The band has four members Akhu, Sachin, Riki and Raju.
sung in the reverence of lord Valmiki but not without the subversion of the dominant religious narratives.
Performances
Poetry: REVOLUTIONARY POETICS by Ashley Tellis, Amartya Kanjilal, Akshi Singh, Shad Naved, M.R. Adithyan, Sonya Gupta, William Stafford
Readings of poems in Spanish and in translation from a wide variety of mainly Latin American poets on the theme of revolution and going beyond the pieties of human rights which literature, in being singular and unverifiable and always reaching for the ever-receding horizon of the politics of the impossible, institutes a critique of anyway. Among the poets whose works will be featured in the readings are Jose Marti, Pablo Neruda, Nicolas Guillen, Ernesto Cardenal, Alfonsina Storni, Gabriela Mistral, Teresa Calderon, Rosario Castellanos, Sandra maria Esteves 6.30 8.30pm Poetry: A FEAST OF FLESH by N.D. Rajkumar N.D. Rajkumar, born into a traditional shaman community in a border town between Kerala and Tamil Nadu, cracks open a world that offers the modern reader stunning glimpses into a magicdrenched, living dalit history. The English translation of his book of poems Give Us This Day A Feast of Flesh has been published by Navayana. Rajkumar work introduced by: S. Anand, Navayana Publishers.
Third Theater: SOAKED, STRETCHED AND SUBMERGED: A CHOREO-POEM performed by Surjit Nongmeikapam, Gautam Bajoria and Parnab Mukherjee
From one genocide to another..we map an every-widening nature of new cartographies of pain. And learn to move from one displacement to another.In my worldfear stalksbut there is also hope. Not the self-help books branding of hope. not even the typical adrenalin pumping hope(or hopelessness) of the MTV Roadies. But a simple yet complex hope. And in that complexity of the simplicity, there is a sense of trying to understand the profundities of life. The performance of the consciousness. Life and its co-ordinates vary from terrorism to inclusiveness. There is also the industry of silence, Basically, wanting to remain silent, the selling of strategic silences and of course the carefully manufactured silence couched in an instant knee-jerk reactions that betrays the hidden agenda.
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FAULTLINES, FREAKS AND FRENEMIES: PROTEST ART BETWEEN INDENTITY AND ALTERITY
Curated by: V.K. Sularia/ Visual Ark Lines can be drawn with brute simplicity or delicate complexity, with contour, shade or texture. Some lines are invidious: they cut into surfaces and define identities with violence and fixity. The right-wing legal philosopher Carl Schmitt defined politics as a line drawn between friends and enemies so that identity could only be secured in opposition to the other, the stranger that is existentially something different and alien. In the extreme case (under the direction of Schmitts Nazi colleagues) these lines formed the basis for extermination. Overcoming this notion of a politics of antagonism, the artists in this exhibition attempt to re-draw the possibilities of politics represented by an alliterative triadFAULT-LINES, FREAKS, AND FRENEMIES. Confronting these three figures as sites of both instability and potential, the painters, illustrators, installation artists, cartoonists, cartographers, and photographers gathered here combine graphic narratives, vernacular techniques, modern technologies, and quotidian materials to reveal politics and identity as not merely enmity but also as solidarity, alterity, intimacy, and in-distinction. FAULT-LINES: Just as a geological fault-line is the surface trace of a deeper source of instability and displacement, whose potential energy can create a cataclysmic earthquake; fault-lines of identity also reveal tectonic changes in the possibilities of politics. Included in the exhibition are novel re-mappings of territories and populations. FREAKS: At the margins of maps, where territories became unknown, it used to be marked here be monsters. Much later, as medical and legal knowledge conquered even monstrosity, the freak became a subject of surveillance and spectacle of extreme deviance. This exhibition re-imagines the marginalizing discourse of freakery as a positive opportunity to re-think possible relationships between nature and the social, so that we may make political interventions in the social construction and reconstitution of nature in caste, religion, and sexuality. FRENEMIES: The colloquial figure of the frenemy subverts the Schmittian distinction between friend and enemy, so that we can re-imagine the ambivalence of political life through other possible relations: the loyal opposition, the intimate enemy, the resident alien, the double-agent, the evil twin, the better angel, the
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Exhibitions
despised minority, the scapegoat, the protestor, or the whistle-blower. Contributing Artists and Series: Anirban Ghosh (Swamped); Anja Kovacs, Ram Bhat, Sumandro Chattapadhyay (Maps for Change); Damerla-Sularia (Docu-Dharma Epic Shlepic); Denise Beaudet (Portraits); Durgabai Vyam, Subhas Vyam, Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand (Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability); Aparajita Nainan and Srividya Natarajan (A Gardener in the Wasteland; Jotiba Phules Fight for Liberty); Sajad Malik (Kashmir in Black and White); Nina Paley (Mimi and Eunice); Parthiv Shah (Photographic Works); Rohan Kothari and Preksha Malik (Dammed); Vishwajyoti Ghosh (Not a Dog Barked).
It is always easier one to pinpoint the fact that EVERY major military disaster in the world has been perpetrated by any one nation state. No, I dont believe that. MANY yes. But EVERY is and should a definite and emphatic no. And, yes, I still resist that nation state as much as possible. Lets now look at the anatomy of the proposed answer which we shall attempt to formulate. Various geo-political groupings have all been habitual colonizers from large nation states to the current trend of nation state blessed corporations. Colonising minds, languages, landscapes, our visions of utopia and most importantly the issue of identity. Join the diverse dots and you see Congo, Chile, Nicaragua, Cuba, Iraq, Afganistan, the silence over Palestine, Balochistan, aspirations of the Kurds, Kashmiris, Manipuris, Nagas, Brus, Chakmasall those countless ones...to whom we have unleashed our brand of colonialism-in different shapes and forms. And that forest of woes has now many more landmines. The corporate sharks are not just the new coloniser-they are at times the new de-facto nation state or the emerging definition of sovereignty. The world is their work-in-progressin that neatly divided zones of comfort and assault... the countries are encouraged to become shareholders (in this globalised capital market of development junkies... and each one of them compile their list of names that have to eliminated either for talking too much and consequently being too uncomfortable). From one genocide to anotherwe map an every-widening nature of new cartographies of pain. And learn to move from one displacement to another. In my worldfear stalksbut there is also hope. Not the self-help books branding of hope not even the typical adrenalin pumping hope (or hopelessness) of the MTV Roadies. But a simple yet complex hope. And in that complexity of the simplicity, there is a sense of trying to understand the profundities of life. The performance of the consciousness. Life and its co-ordinates vary from terrorism to inclusiveness. There is also the industry of silence, Basically, wanting to remain silent, the selling of strategic silences and of course the carefully manufactured silence couched in an instant of knee-jerk reactions that betrays the hidden agenda. Yet, we want to hear the voice of multiple talking heads inside our heads. Those sound bytes inside the mind that challenge all that is the glorious theoretical-inane. These installations on view weave a quilt of these ramblings. Why? Because we have to understand that the world still needs a single rallying point against organized colonialism. There will be multiple points of attack from the neo-colonisers constantly confusing the resistance cadets and throwing up mixed signals. So that the movement people can be used to break up movements. Old ploy. We used to call it divide and rule.
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Now it would be: infiltrate, divide, de-centralise, then sub-divide the decentralisation and then of course rule without any accountability. A singular negotiating point of dissent is more centralized than a million fronts all jostling to free us from the colonisers only to re-colonise us again. Maybe that negotiation point (however dystopian it might sound) is still...the Gandhian idea of tactical passive resistance and creative dissent. And that is exactly why this piece begins with an extract from the seminal text Hind Swaraj. The one that many of us keep going back to understand non-violence of the non-violence and the inner texture of a weave called freedom. We posed the artistes with a battery of a dozen questions. Of which the first ten of them are from Nerudas Book of Questions. The remaining two questions were from Borges The Gold of the Tigers. Participating artistes: Noni Borpujari, Sivaprasad Marar, Five Issues, Pradeep Chandrasiri, R. Ojha, Dhrupadi Ghosh, Baishampayan Saha, Jonathan Tooze, Ruth Dillon, Madhurima Ganguly and Koumudi Patil
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Sabotage and the Indian ladino: Towards a Judicial Reflective Modulation of Colonial Latin America
The concept of sabotage is an interpretive approximation based on the Latin American philosophy and the studies of the Latin American colonial culture resistance expressions, particularly from language and translation experiences in a judicial reflective modulation of colonial Latin America (XVI XVII centuries). The philosophical framework of sabotages conceptualization can be used to establish a new theoretical perspective for cultural studies and its possibilities, especially if it can be combined with the critical approach and critical historiography provided by postcolonial theory in the context of Latin American political philosophy. The word sabotage comes etymologically from the French language. Sabotage originates back to sabot, a wooden shoe (clog). The wooden shoe (sabots) became a symbol since it was thrown into an industrial machine in order to break it. The workers feared the automated machines would render the human workers obsolete. The words sabotage, to sabotage and saboteur are frequently used in politics (policy), syndicalism, the social fights and the military intelligence. We may say that sabotage is a strategy and an instrument of cultural resistance. The sabotages capacity of comprehension and positioning is played within a philosophical perspective from Latin America that does not close its space of reflection to the current non-Eurocentric thinking, leaving its unidirectionality (teleology). The emphasis on the problem of the coloniality of the being as well as its philosophical influences (Enrique Dussel, Anibal Quijano, Bolvar Echeverra), like a platform for the constitution of Latin-American philosophy, that subsequently, develops a strong critique to the Eurocentrism from its ontological and political-philosophical foundations. The recognition of the philosophical character in the indigenous knowledge through nahuatl (Miguel Len-Portilla), quechuan (Josef Estermann) and aymaran thinking (Rodolfo Kusch), determines an assertive and useful reflection. This recognition contemplates the incorporation of the Eurocentric philosophical thinking and the indigenous knowledge, visualizing in this combination an open interaction between two kinds of communication systems, on the Eurocentric hand, an alphabetic and logocentric perspective, on the indigenous hand, a poetical and oral tradition of knowledge and language. The rescue of the diversity is detectable through the interpretation of questions established from its historical-cultural conditions in the colonialitys horizon that gather and recapture the mixtures. The recognition and the rescue from the diversity of the philosophical non-eurocentric comprehension is finally a critique to the eurocentrism that works in an historical current context, considering the possibility to apply in the historicity of colonial Latin American. We try to expose, specifically, a representation of the cultural resistance called sabotage in the figure of the Indian ladino or translator. We will use as examples of saboteurs the cases of Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. We may look under their cultural determinant dimension as cultural mediators and interpreters, particularly in the case of his participation into the Spanish Crowns law system for colonial Latin America and their historical and narrative work (chronicles). This is useful and allows us to consider the translation not only in contexts of domination, but in the manipulation of the dominance 36
conditions in unleashing actions, conversions and subversions, fingerprints and vestiges. What results here is a central matter that answers to the image of the saboteur (the Ladino) while translator, writer and petitioner in historical and judicial terms in the colonial era. Then, we are able to declare the linguistic and cultural mediation as fundamental instance of contact and friction into the Spanish judicial imposition. The transmission, the performance of translations act, works as an instrument for the resistance of the Indians, a kind of inside resistance.
Abstracts
Northeasterner and the Muslim, through four figures from contemporary timesRamachandra Siras, Baby Kamble, Irom Sharmila and Anjum Zamarud Habib, I will attempt in this paper to explore the possibilities of this wild anthropology not through the vulnerable archaic (by which Spivak means tribals in Bengal) but through figures who engage with the literary and the cultural, conventionally seen as non-anthropological arenas and often enough as having little or nothing to do with the political. What does such an exploration do to the field of human rights, to the liberal state and, most importantly, to the futures of what constitutes the political?
Muslim organization run partially by former War on Terror detainees. It seeks to use the controversy around Cageprisoners to consider the limits that the human rights discourse places on organizations engaged in the dayto-day work of making rights claims, especially when they are speaking in the voice of the racial Other.
Between a Rock and Hard Place: Cageprisoners and the Double-Edged Nature of Human Rights Discourse
Throughout the past year, acrimonious public criticism of the Muslim NGO Cageprisoners has generated important questions about the double-edged nature of the human rights discourse. Firstly, the former head of Amnesty Internationals gender unit, Gita Saghal, was suspended from her position after criticizing the organizations high-profile association with Moazzam Begg, who she referred to as Britains most famous supporter of the Taliban. Secondly, a commentator in The Telegraph lambasted Cageprisoners for a satirical blog post published on its website entitled BREAKING NEWS: BARACK OBAMA IS DEAD. The post sought to highlight the hypocrisy of assassinating Bin Laden without trial, at a time when the United States regularly kills civilians in its drone attacks on Pakistan. These two incidents highlight the risks of engaging with a liberal human rights discourse. They provide a springboard from which to ask a timely question - have activists who are fighting for justice for the detainees of the War on Terror, entrapped themselves in the tyrannical language of human rights? Many of these activists derive their guiding vision for justice from Islam, and secular human rights are thereby that which [they] cannot not want. However, they have relied primarily on the legalese of human rights law for example, by calling for the implementation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions in Guantanamo to frame their claims to justice. War on Terror detainees are being kidnapped, tortured, and held indefinitely without due process; the most logical way to enunciate a response to these injustices is to demand that their basic human rights are protected. However, by defending detainees on the basis of universal human rights, activists fail to displace the assumption that it is terrorists who are perpetrating the greatest injustices. Human rights are often articulated in the context of individual violations, so Moazzam Begg becomes an easy target for Saghal, but not the U.S.s decision to fund Islamic fundamentalist groups. Nor does the discourse accommodate questions such as, Why does this particular claim for this particular right resonate at this particular moment? and Why do some people seem less deserving of rights than others? By relying on the language of rights to make their claims, Cageprisoners staff opened the door to attacks from the media and other activists. It is hardly surprisingly that within the liberalist framework, the violated [female] bodies of the others others could be symbolically mobilized by Saghal. Yet again, demands for womens rights gain an instrumental purpose, and render invisible a different political agenda: framing Muslim men (Begg, Osama Bin Laden, and others) as inherently violent and undeserving of human rights protection and therefore, even maybe subhuman. The questionable allegiance of Muslim men to the human rights endeavor also makes them susceptible to attacks as human rights defenders; ergo, Cageprisoners is attacked for its blog post, while academics like Noam Chomsky receive no critique for publishing articles with similar content. The discourse of human rights entraps Cageprisoners: human rights are integral to the fight to defend detainees, but they also invite attacks on male Muslim activists because the ultimate source of injustice remains unnamed. This paper will explore the challenges that Cageprisoners faces in using the human rights discourse, as a 38
Broken houses, Insurgent voices: the right to the city, human rights and the politics of the governed in Luanda, Angola
In this paper, I will address the right to housing as a human right in the case of the African continent, drawing mostly on the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights and legal instruments of international law ratified by African states or African international organizations. I will later analyze this legal and political regime in relation to a broader notion of the right to the city, a concept that has recently been appropriated by subaltern struggles all over the world and has become a central element in contemporary urban politics, both in the West and in the Global South. In a second moment, I intend to look at the legal nature of the right to the city from an anthropological standpoint, recognizing, from a legal pluralist perspective, that legal norms, meanings and understandings are not only generated in the field of formal State legality, but also in many other legal orders and social authorities operating in society. In fact, the right to the city entails and recognizes a whole underworld of social and political struggles being carried out from the margins of modernity from what Chatterjee (2006) has referred to as the political society of those who do not have access to the legitimized, formalized or legalized forms of mobilization common to abstracts notions of citizenry, polity and civil society. From this perspective, a more critical problem to be explored is: to what extent the right to the city and the plural and radical version of human rights that underlies it are being negotiated and constructed not only in the field of official legal authority, but primordially in informal or insurgent (Holston, 2010) spheres of legality from below? In this paper, I suggest that a more productive account of the articulation between law, human rights and the right to the city should look for other codes, spaces of authority and jurisdictions rather than relying only on the legal system of the State it should look, in other words, to the spaces inhabited by and embedded in the politics of the governed (Chatterjee, 2006). The case upon which this research will focus, Luanda, the capital city of Angola, is an excellent example of why we need to look beyond the official courts, beyond the law, as an academic approach and a social urge. This research will explore precisely how, in a context where the relationships between the State and its citizens have been characterized by exclusionary practices of a spatial nature (displacement, dispossession, neglect of the right to land and habitation, etc.), the right to the city can and should be pursued from the outside of official legality from beyond the law. I will focus mostly on the work of different mediators of social struggles and processes of governmentality currently being performed in the space of the city: a local NGO SOS-Habitat dealing with forced evictions and practices of popular protest, and the many private and local newspapers that flourish around 39
the city and often contest official discourses about urban development and attribution of rights. I will be mostly interested in analysing the way these actors engage with issues of human rights and the right to the city in a counter-hegemonic way, as well as in understanding the way they relate to practices of social struggles and subaltern legal politics as performed beyond the space of official legality beyond the law.
advocates. I urge an approach of critical engagement, which requires strong links with protest movements in order to maintain a vision of justice beyond the law while pursuing the radical moments of opportunity the law presents, even if it is by accident.
Gabriela Gonzalez, State University of New York Diana Sankey, Kent Law School
The Enemy Within: Othering and Surveilling during authoritarian regimes in the Southern Cone
This article examines the complex process of social classification and labeling as it operates both through discourse and through linguistics and practices. Particularly, it focuses on the genesis and evolution of the words subversive and seditious to classify certain sectors of society and justify their persecution in the context of the military dictatorships of three Latin American countries (Chile, Argentina and Uruguay). A culture of fear impregnated deep into the social fabric of the countries of the region as a consequence of many years of violation and subjugation of the most basic human rights on the part of the authoritarian regimes. By drawing on rich empirical data, this paper seeks to understand the manifold relations of power that shape the social body, and their embedment in a specific system of truth. It analyses both mechanisms of symbolic and physical violence during this period. The first section of the paper focuses primarily on recovering the official voice expressed in propaganda and military speeches and the mechanisms by which the idea of the subversive emerged and progressively gained power to include vaster sectors of the population. The second section of the paper deepens further into the mechanism under study by reconstructing the counter-narratives of individuals who were persecuted, imprisoned or exiled. These voices are recovered by the usage of primary sources of information collected during the year 2008. This section also focuses on discipline and punishment within the penitentiary system, and the strategies of adaptation and resistance that were deployed by its victims.
Necropolitics And The Stubborn - Stories Of Death And Dying, Between Homestead And The Divine
Cities often derive their vitality from their interstices. The interplay of living forces in these interstitial commons has long assisted the urbanity of the underclass to survive and thrive. With growth oriented developmentalism striking deep roots in Indian cities, the character of these commons is changing, shrinking up these interstices, directly assaulting those who thrive in this twilight zone. This assault has led to both resistance as survival and survival as resistance. Both, and assault and the resistances have a complex relationship with law, in its enforcement, non-enforcement and evasion. This paper is an attempt to detail and understand the forces of resistance at play in the new city, in this case Kolkata - a megalopolis in Eastern India. The set of stories represents aspects of the city which are in interaction but they also derive the color and form of resistance as much from the nature of the assault as from the ecology of the interstice of the citys underbelly - often in spectacular contrast to, but in close encounter with, the sunlit city. I detail a heroic struggle of a man for keep his homestead, who in many ways represents the city that needs to be demolished to make way for the new city. The new city, represented by a coalition of builders of a tall-towered gated community in the heart of the city, is also critically observed - in its culture of taste and response to resistance. The story of his stubbornness, of solidarity and his tragic end looks at the course of the impasse and its tragic resolution, with particular reference to legal and extra-legal battles. A cluster of brief stories is discussed, regarding the changing demography of divinities in the new city - stories of dying gods and resisting goddesses. This story looks closely at the changing self-identity of the perfumed city with reference to 41
Pursuing Gender Pluralism through International Human Rights Law - Promise and Limits
International human rights law constructs the universal subject, the bearer of human rights, thereby determining who is fully human and thus able to claim rights. How is it possible, then, to engage this body of law to move beyond its own (liberal) disciplinary confines and pursue emancipatory goals? I will examine this question by drawing on the mixed experiences of feminists, who have largely focussed on womens rights, and the challenges and opportunities presented to asymmetry and gender dualism by other feminists and queer human rights 40
the liminal divine affiliations that need to be severed at the altar of new urbanity and robust opposition to such displacement of the sacral. This is the story of a goddess abode and her survival - in the margin of the city.
Our bodies have won the victory: Interrogating Nudity and Human Rights Protests in Nigeria
Women have been at the forefront of activism in Nigeria, since the colonial period. As a group often defined as the weaker sex, they have been exploited over time by both the political leadership and men at large. As a result of the wrongly conceived notion of womanhood as a specie without alternatives, the colonial authorities in Southeastern Nigeria attempted to conduct a census using their warrant chiefs in which women would be counted for taxation. The Igbo women in 1929 staged a protest that turned violent, against the warrant chiefs in the region and their colonial overlords. The protest yielded far-reaching political and administrative reforms in the area. These protesting women adopted varied tactics including nudity. In the Western region of Nigeria, Yoruba women had also protested nude in the early 1930s, in their struggle against the Alake of Abeokutas attempted imposition of taxation on women. This nude protest yielded the abdication of the Alake (Paramount ruler), and the scrapping of the planned taxation. The paper intends to interrogate female nudity as a specie of human rights protest for political change, using Nigeria as an analytical springboard.
invoked as the first extraordinary law to get rid of untouchability. This Act was later amended, in the year 1976, to become the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, in order to get rid of the continued violent discrimination against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The need was felt, in year 1989, to enact another law, as earlier special laws, provisions under the Constitution and normal criminal jurisprudence [IPC & CrPC] were unable to deal with offences against the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Therefore, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 [SC/ST (PoA) Act, 1989] was enacted to fulfill these constitutional obligations. This specific act incorporated provisions for more stringent punishments as compared to earlier acts and broadened the horizon of conduct to be considered as atrocities. As is very well known, these legal provisions have largely failed to meet the abstract notions of the social justice of the Indian state. In this scenario, this paper tries to understand the ways in which the givenness of this particular act is subverted and questioned by the politics of contemporary moment. This paper is based on ethnographic studies among four organizations working on issues of equality and social justice in Punjab: Krantikari Pendu Mazdoor Union, Khet Mazdoor Sabha, Dalit Daasta Virodhi Manch and AadhDharm Samaj. The first two of these consider class as their primary focus while the latter two take up caste as a central category for the struggle to attain social justice. One of the important issues the paper tries to explore is how important do these organizations consider this Act in the given conceptual framework of social justice and how often they invoke this act in their struggles; how the meanings of law are decoded by these organizations differently; How the same Act when invoked differently by different subjects/ collectives comes to be experienced differently; how the contemporary movements redefine the very meaning of Atrocities Act. Thus the paper intends to move beyond the usual critique of procedural lapses on the part of the police and judiciary in the implementation of this Act and tries to provide a substantive critique by asking questions which go beyond mere legality.
Voices from the Periphery: Democracy and Abuse in the Global Context
Within the context of liberalism, democracy has been championed as a means toward freedom and equal rights. However, in particular cases, the concept of democracy has been misappropriated to transgress the rule of law or perpetuate inequalities. In this paper, I analyze democracys performance from a theoretical and geopolitical framework that, based on the center/periphery model, emerges from spaces traditionally deemed peripheries. Comparative in nature, I use the works of Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, Claude Ake and Norbert Lechner to demonstrate how the concept of democracy has 1) been politicized to further the agenda and interests of particular nations and ruling classes as shown in the case of the United States foreign policy, 2) failed to represent the will of the people in particular cases on the African continent and 3) interpellated the citizen in an evolving relationship that has diminished citizens agency in the national imaginary. Radhakrishnan explores the state of exceptionalism that has transgressed the rule of law, jeopardizing certain rights and privileges intraand internationally. For Ake, African ruling elite sees Western-style democracy not as a mode of agency for all citizens but rather a means to seek power and control. Finally, Lechner questions democracys mantra freedom to choose as he examines normalizing social, political and cultural discourses that constitute these choices. Understanding how democracy operates, or performs, helps understand its protean nature, in the Derridian sense, a sign whose relationship between the signifier and signified is constantly slipping. However, in the three texts, these performances of democracy illustrate the abusive/elusive nature of democracy.
Excavating the Political Economy of SC/ST (PoA) Act, 1989: Dissenting voices and narratives from the field
To eradicate caste-based oppression, the Indian Constitution makers laid certain limitations upon the rights and enlisted provisions [like Article 22 (7)] for enacting special laws. The Untouchability (Offences) Act, 1955 was 42
Chakraborty and Kujurs scholarship throws substantial light on understanding the ramifications of the Maoist movement in India. Fact-finding reports by Independent Citizens Collective, Human Rights Watch and Asian Human Rights Commission fill in the empirical hole substantially.
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officials seized on child trafficking as a central threat to Haitian children. I will consider the role of international law in changing the meaning(s) of childhood and in doing so foregrounding certain threats to its construction, while obfuscating others.
Kerala (a southern Indian state) to see how these practices pose a challenge to the legally guaranteed models of ownership and property. For this the paper will mainly focus on two distinct lands-related practices which pose a challenge to the dominant theoretical notions- namely Kavu and Teyyam. I will try to see how resistance is being reproduced through these sacred spaces. The instances where adivasi notions of property and ownership become an issue can be seen as reflecting this very problem of the conflict arising due to the application of the property-ownership model to the heterogeneous mass of land relations. Therefore in order to examine the nature of this problem, this paper will develop an understanding about what is the property ownership model of thinking about land relations: its conditions of emergence and its conditions of coherence (i.e. what is the grid and context within which such a model was developed and what are the conditions under which this model makes sense) and use this to analyze adivasi resistance. Secondly, this paper will analyse the classificatory model that is used to find structures of property and see how notions of property can exist within other classificatory systems. But practices like Kavu (sacred groves) and Teyyam (deities and ancestors) show that notions of property where the subjectivity of the owner exceeded humanity were prevalent. An understanding of how notions of property and territory were embedded in spaces that were classified outside the economic registers will help us understand practices of resistance. To this end this paper will look into such sacred spaces as spaces of resistance. This paper will try to show how these practices provide us with new conceptual categories to understand resistance and human rights.
I feel like a dog with the tail between its legs: The limits of protest and the pedagogy of deception
The decentralization of development is a common theme in contemporary international and national development policies. It is seen as the preferred vehicle to address the perceived incapacity of Third World nation-states to uniformly develop their territory and population. Due to their smaller size and the closer proximity between local inhabitants, authorities and service providers, the local, the municipal and the city have emerged in this discussion as virtuous spaces where both development and global integration can be achieved. As some authors have argued: today municipalization means civilization. However, moving the development project from the international and the national to the local is a deliberate strategy with political, administrative, financial and cultural implications. Today, Third World subjects find themselves performing their daily lives in territories that are increasingly fragmented by sub-national jurisdictional frontiers and regulated by numerous levels of governance and cross-enforcing legal and administrative regimes. In this presentation, I will narrate some key moments in the everyday life of a group of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) who have radically challenged, although ineffectively, the successful use of the decentralized development model in Bogot, Colombias capital city. I will argue that the daily chores and discourses of these subjects, and especially their protests against the order imposed on their lives by the local administration, the national government and international institutions, contain important traces of the transformation of the concepts of sovereignty, state and citizenship in todays normative and multi-scalar global ordering. In particular, I pay special attention to how the limitations of these subjects protest have become a lesson about the hard face of law: not justice or rights but ruling and commanding. In a world in which state power is brought increasingly closer to its subjects but without the means to satisfy the minimal requirements for bare life, law becomes the language of administrative domestication and bureaucratic herding for those sitting at the periphery of the development discourse and its declared boundaries. Governmentality through law is in these terrains not an expression of effective ruling at a distance. It is instead the outcome of a systematic administration of failure through materially concrete techniques of state mimicry, the spatialization of subjects and the increasing disaggregation of spheres and grades of authority.
Meera Jensy Moorkoth, Centre for the Study of Culture & Society
are recognized, it would appear that DoR is seeking to bark up the wrong tree. The concept seeks to address an essentially political problem through juridical means, which threatens to mystify this crisis and make it far more difficult to find a solution to it. I see the religion-rights dichotomy in the DoR rhetoric to be precisely a result of this mystification, thus making DoR an unfounded and misplaced language for understanding issues of tolerance and respect for diversity. This is reflected in We in the title of this paper. We in much of the western academic literature tends to be the West, and We for the supporters of the resolutions tends to be the besieged Muslim world. I hope to present as new We- a more collective conception of how all of us may be wrong, and how all of us can conceive of solutions to this issue together.
to the one who does not see, and the inaudible to the one who does not hear. What is significant for this politics is the way in which the ordained sight and speech, or in other words, the political discourse of visibility and speech comes to define what is and in fact what should be the visible and the audible. So in this sense, this paper examines the relations of the events of fasting, force-feeding and confinement to lawfulness, legality and law in order to understand the counter intuitive politics which is at work in Sharmilas offensive, often rebarbative yet refractory act of protest, fasting and persistence. I would divide the paper into two sections. In the first section, I would discuss a moment of definition; one in which Irom Sharmila is alleged to be committing a crime with an intention to kill herself. This moment is particularly significant because when she is defined as the habitual offender, her offence does not lead to a normal procedure of punishment. On the contrary, it leads to a series of interventions in order to save her life. These efforts are of two disparate sets. While one set of interventions postulates that saving her life is to discipline her not to live as the condemned, the other set comes from the idea that saving her life is a way to restore innocence which is lost in the act of condemning. The only commonality of the two sets of interventions is that both sets of interventions originate from law-lawfulness-legality spectrum. Section II looks into the dangers of law by examining how we have to see the manner in which the legality, lawfulness and law as a form of danger coded in the juridical enterprise of permission and prohibition. It explores a specific segment in the construction of a habitual offender in order to show that this construction also operates within a discourse of danger of being lawful and therefore of being legal. Dangers of law in this light is constructed not the issue of how to control dangers through law but rather that law is in itself a danger that operates in revealing the danger to be controlled through law.
Convert, Contest, Protest: The Contours and Politics of Dalit Conversion Movements
This paper will argue that Dalit conversion and particularly Dalit conversion to Christianity between the middle of the 19th century to the end of the first quarter of the 20th century has served as a collective assertion against the caste system and as a means of alternative identity formation outside of its ascription. It will argue that in converting, Dalits are able to latch on to an alternate symbolic world which lies beyond the excluding hierarchy of the caste system as well as the deemed polluted existence of the Dalit symbolic world, thereby emerging as a legitimate subaltern mechanism of dissent. It will further show how conversion has served to re-configure the symbolic world of Dalit communities by dismantling and delegitimizing the dominant metanarrative of the nationalistic project while at the same time erupting a counter narrative which lends itself to a sense of dignity and self-assertiveness of Dalit communities.
each other. But in sharing our predispositions and confronting our worldviews, perhaps we will be encouraged to question the manner in which perception itself happens. In turn, there may be newer and fresher dimensions to what we give and receive.
Dancing Women and New Borders: A Response to the Global Network of Anti-Terrorism in Southeast Asia.
I aim to re-articulate the study of citizenship and the transmission of dance amongst the women of the Sama and Bajau communities in Southeast Asia during the implementation of the Global Anti-Terrorism Network. This is an inquiry into how internationalized regimes of aesthetics strategically mediate the further displacement and marginalization of women within these communities. I examine how the use of legal language concerning female citizenship forcefully disrupts the possibility of women negotiating connectivity on their own, and their transmission of bodily knowledge through so-called traditional female practices (i.e.: dancing) within an already established local, patriarchal space. I further investigate how the fragility of the language of exclusion and inclusion that is embedded within nationalized, globally connected cultural policies, such as the Global Anti-Terrorism Network, only re-affirms the fragmentation of this transmission by viewing it as aesthetic leisure rather than recognizing the possible resistance projects of female dancing bodies that cross borders in Asia. Additionally, these cultural policies fail to resolve both pre-existing tensions of marginality and the violence that results from their implementation. My previous research has focused on the politics of cultural aesthetics during the Suharto regime in Indonesia, and how nationalized dance forms crossed borders and were reconfigured in various modes of consumption, innovation, and potential critique. The core findings from this research are grounded in an analysis of the ways in which narratives of female aesthetic production reveal the complex relationship between dance practice and its significance in the mediation of the continuing presence of colonial nostalgia in a post-colonial state. The proposed paper expands on the concept of dance practice as an archive of embodied memory and experience that becomes reconfigured and maybe fundamentally repurposed when dancing bodies cross national borders. Using the powerful narratives of reconfiguration in the movement between the Global North and Global South that I have studied as a point of departure, my current research will focus on how these experiences manifest in different directional and cultural/economic paradigms of mobility, and how the embodiment of technique can be a form of strategic cultural transmission. In this context, I will examine the mapping and theorization of Diaspora, and the politics of memory, genealogy, migration and the performance of culture, focusing on those who carry inherited practices across and through the fluid borders formed by the dominant presence of oceans in Southeast Asia. To begin with, I will examine the cases of Sama, Bajau, and Orang Laut, three marginalized ethnic groups based in small islands within the territories of the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, whose cultural genealogies have been fragmented by the formation of larger nation states. This fragmentation has been exacerbated by post-9/11 policies of increased vigilance toward intra- and international borders among Southeast Asian islands with Islamic populations. In these peripheral areas, the possession of inherited cultural practices, and the potential to move between islands, and thus often nations, through skilled navigation of local waters, has enabled certain groups to find common artistic ground, as well as a sense of home and possible refuge from the political pressures of marginality in their countries of origin. The ability to move in this manner has functioned to maintain the strength of local cultural history and identity in the face of faroff, yet dominant, state narratives. Artistic practice thus mediates politically subversive, inter-island family gatherings and indirectly functions as a methodology of resistance to dominant discourses of Diaspora and immigration.
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slogans and verses that emerge in response to the immediate, heady surge. By its very nature, a large proportion of such poetry remains in the oral tradition, usually circulated through pamphlets, sung at meeting grounds. The compositions of recognized poets attain the dignity and gravitas of publication. Through the prism of personal experience, the narrative of such poetry is located in the JP movement in Bihar of 1974. This paper does not attempt to decode JPs call for total revolution, its impact on the political spectrum, or the overwhelming response of students to the banner of revolution. Instead, it offers a glimpse of the poetry that lived on long after the movement was over. Personal narratives in the time of protest, and the potent voice of the poet, blend in this paper to write an epitaph to a movement that touched lives, in ways unforeseen.
social relations. It needs to be recognized that the relationship between the law and the manual scavengers has a long history of confrontation, control and coercion. In this paper, I propose to examine this history by looking at three sites of interaction between manual scavenging and the legal discourse. First, the paper critically examines the discourse of essential services through which the colonial state sought to normalize manual scavenging. Second, I discuss how in the post-colonial period, the discourses of customary rights and legislative abolition have dominated the debates on manual scavenging which while attempting to liberate the Dalits, have also normalized and naturalized the caste-based division of labour. And finally, I look at the struggle of the Safai Karamchari Andolan (SKA), an abolitionist group that has been working to emancipate those engaged in manual scavenging. I look at the struggle of the SKA both inside the courtroom, which it launched by filing a Public Interest Litigation at the Supreme Court of India in 2003, and outside it.
What is an outside? What is a revolution without outside? What is an outside without revolution?
While going through the canon of western theory I noticed two dominant forms of theorization one which focuses upon the necessity of interrogating the western/European/white/male/Anglo-centric knowledge system that performs a kind of epistemic violence on several subjugated knowledges and therefore talks about the necessity for decolonization; the other focusing how these very resistances towards colonial pedagogy and knowledge system are themselves informed by it. In the second sense then the political project of decolonization becomes impossible. It is in this second sense also that the question of resistance becomes problematicif resistance is to be performed against a structure then it has to be located outside the structure. The question that then arises is, if the structure is the apparatus the discursive field, then how is one who is a part of it to go against it? Can one then go outside the structure starting from within it? In this context I would like to focus on the phenomenon of looking back towards the past revolution (revolution being a form of resistance to the existing order of things). I intend to do this with the help of a few memoirs of former activists of the Naxalbari movement. My essay will not be a simple criticism of the Naxalbari movement concerning why it failed or whether it failed at all. Rather, it would re-narrativize the Naxalbari movement by privatizing what once was intensely political. In brief, resistances are thought of in terms of transcendence of the existing order. But by following some commentators on the Naxalbari movement like Rabindra Ray and Mallharika Sinha Roy, I would attempt to show how the very ideas of justice, injustice and desire for resistance are existentially located in the immediate and existing state of belonging. Instead of actually being negated, emotions like anger, pain, fellow feeling, hatred etc. continuously affect public action and political existence and are also affected by those. I would also try to examine if the study and understanding of these negations can help us look into the outside of the structures of existence, which nonetheless is immanent in these structures. So resistances would be studied as immanent within the structure but at the same time as having the ability to transcend it.
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This paper asks: What does it mean to stake an equal claim for all to loiter in public space? How does one engage with the threat posed by one group of such loiterers to another potential group? How does one understand claim staking in a context where city public spaces are surveillanced and policed? What are the claims of different kinds of bodies and how can we arrive at an idea of justice that at least attempts to address the claims of as many different groups as possible?
Literatures that Emerge from Within Social Movements and Re/presentations of Resistance: The Case of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy
Bhopal Gas Tragedy has generated an entire body of literatures that can be categorized as popular, academic and official. However, if used separately, they fail to define the event. The Author uses the term literatures as an elusive category that brings within its folds different discourses. She looks at some of the significant mainstream literatures that are pro-establishment and media driven, subaltern literatures produced by NonGovernmental Organizations, but is primarily interested in the third neglected category of oral, homespun, 55
emotive and empowering literatures belonging to the impacted community that hardly gets written about. It is important to understand how these separate categories co-exist. On the face of it, these disparate discourses are a necessary part of the dynamic field, and create the framework, within which the State versus People gets worked out officially. Subaltern literature gets sidelined through middle-class interventions, and what gets showcased is the ideological point of view that endorses well-defined notions of development and corporatization. It is in this context of representation that literatures emerge from within social movements as tools of resistance against monolithic powers. Such literatures being mostly oral in nature are politically significant, since most of the survivors, especially women, are not as literate or educated. Using historical time-lines to show changing material conditions to bring about changes in the nature of representations is important. But, the only way to increase the visibility in the global arena is by bringing in the outsiders perspective on social movements. An important issue that will be addressed is how learning happens in social movements, using two theoretical modules cognitive praxis and contentious performances to talk about how peoples knowledge gets played out in performative and verbal/gestural art forms. We will see how a needs-based fight for material benefits changes to a rights-based struggle for a life of dignity, and how peoples knowledge becomes an important tool. These movements introduce social and political beliefs, drawn from specific cultural contexts, into technological and specialized knowledge. Media is brought to capture these images and spread them to a larger audience. Pertinently, writers and artists come to these events to show their solidarity. Bhopal has always been a nonviolent movement, using peaceful methods of protest. It has generated literatures in the form of street plays, etc. The Author takes up a few such representations that are both visual and performative. By tracing innovative actions from the initial stage of planning to its final execution, she will show how it becomes a text that is conceptualized and scripted by grassroots activists, who get to be empowered by telling their stories in their own words
social and individual action. In culling out each of these aspects, the paper will look at the use of the agit prop, both by theatre companies as well as by the people at a particular moment in history. So from the practice of the agit prop by the Blue Blouse workers in Russia the paper will look at its use in the Philippines, South Korea, Czechoslovakia, United States, Africa, Australia, India and lately, Egypt.
Antigones Claim? : Political Extremity and Performance of Pain by Women on the Indian Stage
This paper will attempt to analyse the social conventions that surround performances of pain and shame (especially by womens bodies on the contemporary Indian stage) in order to explore the fraught borders between the real and the theatrical, the felt and the perceived, the instrumental and the ethical. It will seek to explore how notions of acceptable theatricality are determined within a dominantly secular liberal society and how these may be challenged at moments by an actor who is also an agent of pain and shame. It seeks to explore also how newer modes of political action maybe forged through the performance of pain, whether in theatre or outside it. Nandikars production of Antigone was first staged in Bengali in Kolkata on the 25th of March, 1975. Keya Chakraborty played the lead role while Ajitesh Bandyopadhyay played the part of Creon. The adaptation and direction was by Rudraprasad Sengupta who names both Sophocles and Jean Anouilh as his sources. Performed during the national Emergency, Antigones repeated and resounding no to Creon, in this adaptation by Nandikar, appears to be an absolute refusal, one that does not contain a possible yes within its folds. It is a no without a pragmatic directionality or a definite telos that can viably be translated into concrete eventualities. In the extreme political conditions of the Emergency, Antigone is the exception of the exception the sheer liminality that exposes the limits of the states reason and like every aporia worth its name, she is not teleologically calculable. Her action is performative in essence; like a curse or a ritual chant, its content does not inhere solely in what it states. But in being performed, her action brings into being something that is in the nature of an unorganized surplus that cannot possibly be subsumed within the logic of the state, even though and especially because, it achieves nothing instrumentally. Read this way, in Antigones claim, and in the actress Keya Chakrabortys assertion of the importance of saying a repeated and resounding no in the face of the most depressing knowledge ones ineffectuality in the realpolitik, we are perhaps looking at a significant reformulation of what conventionally counts as political action itself. This paper seeks to elaborate on why this is so
Remaking Leviathan: Rulers, Civilizers, and Rebels in Historical and Contemporary Jharkhand
As state, media, activist, and academic discourses speak in one voice over Maoists, what I want to ask in this paper is who is a Maoist and what it means to resist the state in the heart of India. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and archival research on Jharkhand, I argue that rebellion must be understood as emerging from the interstices between the state, civilizers such as missionaries and NGOs, and rural adivasi elites. Furthermore, I point to clear parallels between contemporary repertoires and strategies of subaltern resistance in Jharkhand and those associated with Birsa Mundas revolt (1895-1901) against colonial authority over a century ago. As such, I conclude, we ought to view both sets of adivasi rebels as engaged in local and regional contests over land, forest and water resources (jal, jangal, jameen), and hence, as attempting to negotiate sovereignty within the structures of the Indian state as well as their respective communities. 57
Unlearning Human Rights and False Grand Dichotomies: Indonesian Archipelagic Selves beyond Sexual/Gender Universality
This study presents a critical genealogical analysis of the narratives and politics of representation of various human subjectivities in Indonesia who transgress the dominant universalising sexual and gender norms. It traces both macro- and micro-streams of regulation, including those reliant on a liberal legalistic discourse of human rights, whose extremities produce the stringent heteronormative versus homonormative poles the two mutually reinforcing otherworlds bereft of the intrinsic complexity of sexual/gender experience across the countrys archipelagic selves. This tacit othering, inapt to account for numerous local identitary frictions, transitions and re-appropriations owed, inter alia, to distinct non-sexual and non-gender communitarian dynamics, continues to usher in an alien dichotomy of personhood, whose referential, idealised self and juxtaposed other are both violently simplified and tainted with heightened ideological overtones. Against a backdrop of these impoverished binaries, this study confronts the multiple difficulties that a researcher of such phenomena inevitably encounters, ranging from the perils of internationalised taxonomies (pertinent to sexuality/gender studies and their varying theoretical streams), such as LGBT, to the paradigmatic strategy of silent disidentification (the refusal to self-identify with certain or any groups founded on sexual/ gender difference), employed by the local subjectivities as a peculiar form of resistance. It is posited that these complexities are perhaps best captured and exposed if numerous globalised a priori binaries (hetero/homo, male/female, East/West, etc., including the moralistic liberal discourse on regress/progress) and legalistic panaceas (e.g., liberal discourse on human rights) are gradually unlearnt and disestablished in favour of localespecific inquiries into collective and individual selves and their counter-hegemonic social stratagems. The Indonesian narratives of polyversal (Eisenstein) personhood offer one such opportunity.
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ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Ruchira Goel, Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat, India rgoel@jgu.edu.in Arpita Gupta, Research Associate, Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat, India agupta@jgu.edu.in Chakravarti Patil, Formerly Senior Research Associate, Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat India chakravarti.patil@gmail.com
COLLABORATORS
Instituto Cervantes in New Delhi The Instituto Cervantes is a public institution founded in 1991 by the Government of Spain, with the aim of promoting Spanish language teaching, and fostering knowledge of Spanish and Hispanic American culture. Currently, the Institute has 78 centers located in 44 countries. Its main headquarters are in Madrid and in Alcal de Henares, the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes. The work of the Instituto Cervantes is guided by representatives of the scholarly, cultural and literary communities of Spain and Hispanic America. In New Delhi, the Institute collaborates with museums, galleries, theaters, publishers, and other Indian cultural institutions, as well as institutions from Spain and Latin America. Alliance Franaise de Delhi Alliance Franaise relies on a large network of more than a thousand associations, established in 136 countries and delivering courses to a total of 46000 students. Alliance Franaise de Delhi is an Indo-French cultural centre which specializes in French language teaching, organizing and curating cultural events.
SUPPORTERS
Mohan Law House Social & Legal Studies: An International Journal Oxford University Press India Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi
CONVENORS
Oishik Sircar, Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat, India osircar@jgu.edu.in Vik Kanwar, Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat, India vkanwar@jgu.edu.in Rajshree Chandra, Associate Professor, Janki Devi Memorial College, Delhi University, India rajshreechandra@yahoo.in Navprit Kaur, Research Associate, Institute for Development and Communication, Chandigarh, India navspreet@gmail.com
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The Protest Workshop is an experiment that strives to be inclusive, interdisciplinary, rigorous, provocative and political and we would like to believe that more than an event it will serve as the inauguration of conversations that will continue to trouble the ostensible neatness of academic research with the committed objective of enabling multilogues thatll help us critique and comprehend, with theoretical sophistication, the curious mutations of protest in our times. Though thanks are due to a multitude of people, for the moment we would like to thank the following: BIARI for reposing faith in the project and extending generous funding to bring together people from all over the world and India PROF. C. RAJ KUMAR, Vice Chancellor of the O.P. Jindal Global University and Dean of the Jindal Global Law School without whose support, encouragement and cooperation we could have never pulled this off INSTITUTO CERVANTES and ALLIANCE FRANAISE DE DELHI for coming together in the spirit of collaboration to host Protest Workshop events in Delhi THE ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF AND FACULTY at O.P. Jindal Global University who provided exemplary organizational support and ideas STUDENT VOLUNTEERS from Jindal Global Law School who have been the foot soldiers leading many organizational and creative tasks from the front ALL PARTICIPANTS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD AND INDIA who have remained committed to the idea of the Protest Workshop and travelled long distances to be part of it SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, MOHAN LAW HOUSE, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AND ATLANTIC PUBLISHERS & DISTRIBUTORS, without whose additional financial support we would not have been able to carry off this elaborate event in its entirety
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Acknowledgements
We believe that to say thank you might be too pretentiously formal, especially when our attempt has beento convene an intellectual space where solidarity precedes pleasantries. But we will say thank you just to honour the inherent fidelity of the phrase, and its ability to convey a lot of gratitude in just two words.
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The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox In 4 parts without commercial interruptions
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal. The revolution will not get rid of the nubs. The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother
The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people. You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl. The revolution will not go better with Coke. The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath. The revolution will put you in the driver's seat
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised. The revolution will be no re-run brothers; The revolution will be live.
www.protestworkshop.jgu.edu.in
THE FACE OF PROTEST: Our Logo Concept and Design: Anirban Ghosh, National Institute of Design The face evokes a sense of rigidity, seriousness and alertness. It is not cartoony. It is looking to its left and not making direct eye contact with the viewer. It also creates an anxiety that it might look at you any moment hence, not keeping any room for voyeuristic pleasure. This face is resting on its edge where it is vulnerable. But the same form with an edgy bottom gives it sharpness thatprotests oppression. Thanks to SOFT SKULL PRESS for allowing us to freely use artistic works from their book Reproduce & Revolt/Reproduce Y Reblate, edited by Josh MacPhee & Favianna Rodriguez