Public Lecture on Inter-Asian Research: New Knowledge Forms for the 21st Century

Tejaswini Niranjana, Director of the Centre for Inter-Asian Research, Ahmedabad University, India

The public lecture will focus on institutional and epistemological challenges faced by the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Network. The two decades old Network has been trying to overcome various kinds of methodological nationalisms. The lecture will be addressing the following questions followed by comments from the discussant:

How can we re-imagine research for the post-pandemic present?
What does it mean to think about interconnections in Asia that do not fall into colonial frameworks or Cold War geographies?
How do we articulate new axes of connection?
How do we produce innovative notions of ‘region’?
What kinds of flexible platforms would we need to develop forms of knowledge relevant to the 21st century, and to provide insights into the forms of life which are being shaped in the region?

Date & Time: May 20, 2022; 3 pm (Naryn), 2 pm (Khorog)

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Speaker

Tejaswini Niranjana is a Director of the Centre for Inter-Asian Research at Ahmedabad University, India. She has authored several publications, including Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (2020), published by Duke University Press. Recently, Dr. Niranjana has edited Music, Modernity and Publicness in India (Oxford UP, 2020). She is the co-producer of three documentary films related to music, and a curator of Saath-Saath, the India-China music collaboration project (http://saathsaathmusic.com). Her book, Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (University of California Press, 1992), has impacted a wide range of fields from anthropology and history to post-colonial studies. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently awarded with the National Translation Prize for Fiction by the American Literary Translators’ Association.

Discussant

Razak Khan is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), Georg-August-University Göttingen. His research interests include socio-cultural, intellectual and affective history of South Asian Muslims in Modern India and Germany. He has edited the special themed issues in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (Brill, 2015) and Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (Duke University Press, 2020), and is author of the monograph Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur (Oxford University Press, 2022).