Fw: H-ASIA: Seeking Panelists: Annual Conference on South Asia (reposted)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Field" <shanghaidrew@GMAIL.COM>
To: <H-ASIA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 6:03 AM
Subject: H-ASIA: Seeking Panelists: Annual Conference on South Asia
(reposted)

H-ASIA
Mar 16 2011

Seeking Panelists: Annual Conference on South Asia (reposted)
****************************************
From: Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury <nusrat@uchicago.edu>

Dear Moderator,

I am sending again the CFP for our proposed panel for the Madison
conference. In the post sent out yesterday the abstract came out all
jumbled
and was hard to read. This time I have attached it as a document as
well.
Hopefully it will look OK this time around.

Thanks much.
Nusrat Chowdhury

[ed note: sometimes the text of a message sent to us for posting may
contain "return" commands that break up the sentences awkwardly when
posted, and it is hard to tell this in advance of posting. Best to
make sure that the text is properly formatted before sending it to us.]

CFP: Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, WI, October 20-23, 2011

Panel Title: Regimes of Representation: Theorizing Contemporary Politics

Organizers: Shefali Jha, Nusrat S Chowdhury (University of Chicago)

Discussant: William Mazzarella (University of Chicago)

In a familiar model of the political, a people assert its sovereign
status
in the right to choose and dismiss its spokespersons. Thus,
"representative
government" most readily springs to mind as the conceptual equivalent of
"democracy." While we know that the persistently chaotic forms of mass
politics in South Asia and elsewhere have posed a serious challenge to
this
hegemonic view, in this panel we seek to complicate the direction of
this
relationship between representation and politics. We ask how the
desires and
affective energies words and images tap into, that is, representation in
another sense, allow us a glimpse into the fabric of the political.
How do
existent and emergent regimes of representation contribute to the
making of
political constituencies? In what ways do they urge us to look closely
at
bounded spaces – neighborhoods, cities, nation-states – as sites where
specific vocabularies and institutions find a home and a performative
charge? For instance, secular politics reads the specter of terror
into its
other by marking certain spaces and vocabularies as backward and
dangerous,
while images of violence against the illegal migrant, all-too-easily
subsumed in the category of "terrorist," bring into relief the
intimacy of
terror and territoriality. Certain representations may also help erase
tensions between the logic of consumerism and the fantasies of
development
that often get laminated on the urban-rural spatiotemporal divide. How
could
our scholarly inquiries – ethnographic or historical – tell us more
about
these conflicts, terrors, *and* potentialities of democratic politics
today?
We seek contributions that speak to the concerns raised in the panel
about
the powers of representation in modern South Asian politics.

Please submit 250-word abstracts to Shefali Jha
(shefalij@uchicago.edu) or
Nusrat S Chowdhury (nusrat@uchicago.edu) by March 21 to be considered.
The
panel submission deadline is April 1, 2011.
------------------------------

--
Nusrat S Chowdhury
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago