Centre for Global and Transnational Politics

Research Network South Asia presents:

'Pakistan: business as usual?' – Thursday 25 Feb, Win 0-02, 17:00.

A round table event with David Taylor, Umar Khan, Ali Usman Qasmi, Daniel Haines, Sarah Ansari, Humayun Ansari, Markus Daechsel

 Instead of reflecting on the over-used question of whether Pakistan can 'survive' the present crisis, we will be posing a slightly more relaxed and historically informed question: what is really new about the present crisis, and to what extent are we dealing only with a variation on problems that have had a long established place in Pakistani history? What can we - as historians or historically informed political scientists - say about long-term trends in Pakistan's history?

Research Network South Asia presents

'Fugitive Mullas and Outlawed Fanatics: Indian Muslim subjects in 19th century trans-Asiatic politics'

Professor Seema Alavi, University of Delhi

Thursday 4^th February, 5pm WIN 02/3

All welcome

Seema Alavi is a professor of history at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, India. She specializes in medieval and early modern South Asia, with an interest in the transformation of the region’s legacy from Indo-Persian to one heavily affected by British colonial rule. She has written books on the military and medical cultures of the region from medieval to modern times. Her most recent book is Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–1900 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

By mapping the migration of Arabic men of learning from India to West and Southeast Asia, Alavi is currently exploring the making of an Arabic imperium that existed alongside British colonialism in nineteenth-century South Asia. She will study the impact of such diasporic networks on the politics and culture of colonial India.

Alavi earned her PhD from the University of Cambridge in England. She has twice been a Fulbright Scholar and a Smuts Visiting Fellow at Cambridge and was a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute. She wrote Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770–1830 (Oxford University Press, 1995) and translated, with Muzzafar Alam, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The I‘jaz-i Arsalani (Persian Letters 1773–1779) of Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (Oxford University Press, 2001). She edited The Eighteenth Century in India (Oxford University Press, 2002) and serves on the editorial board of several journals, including Modern Asian Studies.

20 January 2010, 5pm, Founders West 101

Reading Achille Mbembé’s On the Postcolony.

Joint event with the  POSTCOLONIAL RESEARCH GROUP

Wednesday 25 November 2009, at  5 p.m. Room Win 1-04

Refreshments from 4.45pm

 All welcome

More details about the Research Network South Asia here: http://web.me.com/mdae/RNSA/Events.html

Readings for the event are available here http://www.cameronius.com/helen/RHPRG/page-events-1.htm

Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony is one of the most influential texts published in recent years to theorise about the nature of the postcolonial state in Africa. It ranges widely, drawing on political theory, literary criticism and ethnography. Mbembe asks demanding questions about the problems of contested sovereignty, violence and the ‘aesthetic spectacles’ of postcolonial government in Africa. As he says, ‘the notion of postcolony identifies specifically a given historical trajectory - that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and violence which the colonial relationship involves.’ The echoes of colonialism, in short, shape the present. This begs the question of African exceptionalism; how far can this book help us understand the contemporary South Asian state?  How should we conceptualise state power in South Asia today? This reading group will read two chapters from On the Postcolony alongside work by Thomas Blom Hansen on the Indian state – in order to open up a discussion on theatricality, violence and sovereignty in Indian political life.

The new South Asia Research Network is an interdisciplinary network open to all students and staff with an interest in the politics, geography, history and culture of contemporary South Asia. A new website to be launched shortly and the following events are scheduled for this term.

‘Empires of the Indus’: Alice Albinia in Conversation.

8 October 2009  at 5pm, Founders West 101

Alice Albinia will talk about her widely acclaimed book Empires of the Indus, for which she won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for work in progress. She read English literature at Cambridge and South Asian history at SOAS, then worked for two years in Delhi as a journalist, critic and editor. The book was written during an audacious journey through Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and Tibet. Empires of the Indus follows the river upstream and back in time, taking the reader on a voyage through two thousand miles of geography and more than five millennia of history redolent with contemporary importance.

‘Empires of the Indus is a magnificent book, a triumphant melding of travel and history into a compelling story of adventure and discovery … an inspiring book, and readers with even a fraction of Albinia’s wanderlust will want to set off on their own explorations.' (Paddy Docherty, Financial Times )

'The truly great achievement of this book is to reveal, unflinchingly and with panache, the rich and varied heritage of the Indus in all its appalling splendour'. (Guardian )

'The Future of Subaltern Studies': David Hardiman.   

21 October 2009 at 5pm room tbc

'Reading Achille Mbembé’s Postcolony'.               

25 November 2009 at 5pm room tbc