“Ways of Being”: Book Talk with Sabyn Javeri

“Ways of Being”: Book Talk with Sabyn Javeri

Open to the NYU Abu Dhabi community and by invitation.
4th May 2022. 18.00 – 19.30.
The Reading Room, NYUAD Art Gallery (A4-008).

With Sabyn Javeri, Saba Karim Khan, and Huma Umar.

Does writing have a nationality? Are writers defined by geography, language, religion, gender and ethnicity alone, or are there other attributes that identify them? ‘Ways of Being’ – An Anthology of Pakistani Women’s Creative Non-Fiction looks at questions of ‘being’ and ‘belonging’. How does a writer relate to her context, whether at ‘home’ or ‘away’, and locate herself and her writing in it? How do they navigate the world around them and how do they resist becoming representatives of their ‘kind’?

Workshop: Urban Transformations in Asia

Workshop: Urban Transformations in Asia

Photo of building

Open to the NYU Abu Dhabi community and by invitation.
28-29 April 2023.
Convened by George Jose.

Cities, especially in the broader west and south Asia region, are characterized by a construction boom, innovations in mobility and transportation infrastructures, a consolidation of surveillance networks, and dynamic media, hospitality, care, and culture industries. These transformations have, in its turn, produced new forms of leisure, increased informality, and multiplied housing and work precarity. This two-day workshop will explore current trends and future trajectories of cities in Asia including an assessment of the dynamics of social infrastructure, including migration, gender and consumption, land markets, digital technologies, climate change and popular resistance in the cities of the global south.

Register here.

For the programme and list of participants, visit our project page.

Sponsored by the NYU Abu Dhabi Global Asia Initiative and CITIES, NYUAD.
Photo courtesy of Yasmin Hamad.

Musical Crossings: Re/semblance in Mumbai, Hong Kong, Shanghai

Musical Crossings: Re/semblance in Mumbai, Hong Kong, Shanghai

Open to the NYU Abu Dhabi community and by invitation.
27th April 2023. 17.00.
The Reading Room, NYUAD Art Gallery (A4-008).

With Tejaswini Niranjana.

Journeys involving music, migration and modernity have been central to my thinking about cultural practice in the last couple of decades. From African-Asian crossings in the Caribbean to Hindustani music in Mumbai to Indian-Chinese musical crossings, these journeys traverse issues of nationhood and subject-formation as they take shape in the global south. As I explore these trajectories of music and voice production, I try not to use the vocabulary of fusion and multi-culturalism which tend to flatten into easy resolution a host of complicated histories of connection and dis-connection. The focus of my talk is on Saath-Saath, a project that brings together vocalists, instrumentalists and a poet from India, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. These artists met from 2016 to 2020 across these different locations and made music together as they experimented with language and melody. Their album was released in 2021 and was nominated for the Grammy Award. The docufilm, Movement Traces (dir. Surabhi Sharma, 2021) maps the musicians’ journey. During this talk I will play songs from the Saath-Saath album as well as clips from the film.

Speaker bio:
Tejaswini Niranjana is Director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research, and Dean, Online Programmes at Ahmedabad University. From 2016-2021 she was Professor and Head, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and Director, Centre for Cultural Research and Development. She is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, which offered an innovative inter-disciplinary PhD programme from 2000-2012.

Professor Niranjana is the author of Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (University of California Press, 1992), Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Duke UP, 2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (Duke UP, 2020). Her most recent edited volumes include Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Orient Blackswan, 2015) with Wang Xiaoming; and Music, Modernity and Publicness in India (Oxford University Press, 2020).

She is curator of the Saath-Saath Project, a musical collaboration between Indian and Chinese performers: http://saathsaathmusic.com, and producer of three documentary films based on her music research (directed by Surabhi Sharma).

The Migration-Development Regime: How Class Shapes Indian Emigration

The Migration-Development Regime: How Class Shapes Indian Emigration

Open to the NYU Abu Dhabi community and by invitation.
24th April 2023. 16.00 – 17.30.
The Reading Room, NYUAD Art Gallery (A4-008).

A book discussion with Rina Agarwala (Johns Hopkins University).

Discussants: Veda Narasimhan (Economics), Harshana Rambukwella (LitCW), and Anju Mary Paul (SRPP)

Book description:
A sweeping history of how India has used its poor and elite emigrants to further Indian development and how Indian emigrants have reacted, resisted, and re-shaped India’s development in response.

How can states and migrants themselves explain the causes and effects of global migration? The Migration-Development Regime introduces a novel analytical framework to help answer this question in India, the world’s largest emigrant exporter and the world’s largest remittance-receiving country. Drawing on an archival analysis of Indian government documents, an original data base of Indian migrants’ transnational organizations, and over 200 interviews with poor and elite Indian emigrants, recruiters, and government officials, this book exposes the vital role the Indian state (from the colonial era to the present day) has long played in forging and legitimizing class inequalities within India through the management of international emigration. It also exposes how poor and elite emigrants have differentially resisted and re-shaped state emigration practices over time. By taking a long and class-based view, this book recasts contemporary migration not simply as a problematic function of neoliberalism or as a development panacea for sending countries, but as a dynamic historical process that sending states and migrants have long used to shape local development. In doing so, it re-defines the primary problems of global migration, exposes the material and ideological impact that migration has on sending state development, and isolates what is truly novel about contemporary migration.

 

A View from Asia: Changing Global Demography

With Tragaki Alexandra.

Postponed.

Home to 6 out of 10 living persons, Asia is the region the most demographically heterogeneous. The Asian population ages rapidly; however regional differences in the level and speed of aging are striking. There are countries that managed to reap the first demographic dividend, others that are currently under the transition towards the fourth stage of demographic transition, while others are trying to benefit from the longevity dividend.

Demographic figures are (most often) striking; the world changes rapidly. Population size, growth rates and geographical distribution are issues discussed widely, but rarely in depth: very little is said about their implications at regional, national, or international levels. Population trends are crucial for the environment, economic growth, social cohesion as well as international relations, yet they remain largely overlooked.

In the 21st century, population concerns are very different to those of the previous century. Population-age structure is the most important factor when the perspectives of a country are examined. Increasing life expectancy has resulted in more cohorts of people that have grown up during different historical periods and shaped by very different major events, living in the same time period. Never before have our societies been as multi-generational as they currently are. Social cohesion may be at stake due to different needs and priorities, but also due to persistent age-segregation.Different cohorts age differently. Though demographic trends are very much predictable, their economic, social and environmental outcome remains uncharted. An interdisciplinary approach to address challenges emerging from unprecedented demographic changes is now more needed than ever before.