From dak at sarai.net Wed Mar 3 10:50:58 2010 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:50:58 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] Pirate Modernity: Book Discussion Message-ID: <4B8DF1BA.4060303@sarai.net> We invite you to a book discussion of Ravi Sundaram's *Pirate Modernity: Delhi's Media Urbanism, Routledge, London and Delhi. 2010 * *Venue:* CSDS, Seminar Room *Location:* 29 Rajpur Road *Date:*Wednesday, March 10th, 2010. *Time:* 5pm *Discussants* Lawrence Liang Awadhendra Sharan Nivedita Menon *Refreshments will follow the discussion* --- Using Delhi's contemporary history as a site for reflection, Pirate Modernity moves from a detailed discussion of the technocratic design of the city by US planners in the 1950s, to the massive expansions after 1977, culminating in the urban crisis of the 1990s. As a practice, pirate modernity is an illicit form of urban globalisation in cities where low cost technologies are accessed by residents. Urban populations increasingly inhabit non-legal spheres: unauthorized neighbourhoods, squatter camps and bypass legal technological infrastructures (media, electricity). This pirate culture produces a significant enabling resource for subaltern populations unable to enter the legal city. Equally, this is an unstable world, bringing subaltern populations into the harsh glare of permanent technological visibility, and attacks by urban elites, courts and visceral media industries. The book examines contemporary Delhi from some of these sites: the unmaking of the citys modernist planning design, new technological urban networks that bypass states and corporations, and the tragic experience of the road accident terrifyingly enhanced by technological culture. Pirate Modernity moves between past and present, along with debates in Asia, Africa and Latin America on urbanism, media culture, and everyday life. The book suggests cities have to be revisited afresh after proliferating media culture. *To order the South Asia edition, visit the Scholars without Borders on-line bookstore: * http://www.scholarswithoutborders.in/item_show.php?code_no=CUL107&ID=undefined&calcStr = *The book is also available in bookstores in India. The international paperback is due this summer.* -- *[[END OF NEWSLETTER]] * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dak at sarai.net Tue Mar 16 17:00:24 2010 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:00:24 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] Passionate Refrains: The Theatricality of Urdu on the Parsi Stage Message-ID: <4B9F6BD0.3080707@sarai.net> *Talk at Sarai.* *Prof. Kathryn Hansen* will deliver a talk on *Passionate Refrains: The Theatricality of Urdu on the Parsi Stage* *Venue: Seminar Room- CSDS* *Date: 18 March 2010* *Time: 4:00 pm* *Passionate Refrains: The Theatricality of Urdu on the Parsi Stage:* The Parsi theatre contributed to the development of Indian cinema in textual legacies of story and theme, genre and star roles. It also supplied technical expertise, personnel, and capital vital to the new industry. This paper considers another aspect of the Parsi theatre connection: the stylized structures of language, thought, and feeling associated with the Urdu language. Beginning with the popular pageant, the Indar Sabha, Parsi theatrical companies embraced the poetics of the Urdu ghazal with its declarations of ishq (passion) and recurring radifs (refrains). Why did Urdu win out over English and Gujarati as the dominant language of the then Bombay-based theatre? The analysis traces the contribution of Urdu munshis (playwrights), who together with their more illustrious actor-manager employers, co-created a distinctive Parsi-Urdu theatrical style. The performance of Urdu poetry together with Hindustani music and dance is seen as enhancing the literary appeal and musicality of new dramas, imparting a commercial advantage. Moreover, changes in playhouse design and the conventions of melodrama called for a forceful, rhythmic style of delivery, for which actors trained in Urdu were well-suited. The paper includes a case study of Agha Hashr Kashmiri, author of countless dramas and screeplays, focusing on his historical allegory, Yahudi ki Larki. A clip from the 1955 film version will be shown to illustrate the histrionic style of the great actor, Sohrab Modi. ------------------------------------------------------- Kathryn Hansen is professor at the Department of Asian Studies, University of Texas, Austin. Prof. Hansen earned her Ph.D. in South Asian Studies (Hindi/Urdu) from the University of California, Berkeley. Her areas of specialization are South Asian languages and literatures; folk and classical performance of music and dance in South Asia and its diaspora; history of theatrical practices in India; early Indian film history; feminist theory, gender and spectatorship. Currently she is involved with four research projects: Theatrical Memoirs: Translation of Life Narratives from the Parsi Theatre Theatre and the Creation of New National Cultures: The Parsi Theatre and Its Asian Offshoots The Mythological Genre in Indian Theatre and Early Cinema Melodrama and the Parsi Theatre Prof. Hansen's recent significant publications are: 2009 "Staging Composite Culture: Nautanki and Parsi Theatre in Recent Revivals," South Asia Research, 29(2): 151-68. 2006 "Ritual Enactments in a Hindi 'Mythological': Betab's Mahabharat in the Parsi Theatre," in Economic and Political Weekly of India (Mumbai), December 2, 2006, 4985-4991. 2005 A Wilderness of Possibilities: Urdu Studies in Transnational Perspective, edited and introduced by Kathryn Hansen and David Lelyveld. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2005 Somnath Gupt, The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development, translated and edited by Kathryn Hansen. Calcutta: Seagull Books. ----------------------------------- *[[END OF NEWSLETTER]]* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dak at sarai.net Wed Mar 31 13:15:41 2010 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:15:41 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] Book Discussion on After Utopia Message-ID: <4BB2FDA5.3020804@sarai.net> *CSDS* *Invites you to a discussion of* * Aditya Nigam's* /*After Utopia: Modernity, Socialism and the Postcolony*/ *Publisher: Viva Books, Delhi 2010* *Discussants* *Ravi Sundaram* *Rajarshi Dasgupta* *Prathama Banerjee* *Refreshments will follow the discussion* *Venue: CSDS, Seminar Room* *29 Rajpur Road* *Friday, 9 April 2010.* *Time: 5pm* */After Utopia/* is an attempt to think new political practices and subjectivities in the twenty-first century. It recognizes that our present demands a reinvention of the great dream of a world beyond capitalism and a world without borders that marxism once dreamt of. It argues that if the world today has to save itself from impending all round disaster, brought on by the ravages of capital and Empire, it must once again confront questions of class and property relations. It must also reclaim the earth from capital. But */After Utopia/* is written with the deep awareness of the post-utopian world that we inhabit, where there are no fixed and ready-made answers to these questions that marxism once posed. They can and do arise in entirely unanticipated ways and demand fresh responses. It therefore argues that this requires a fundamental restructuring of our vision -- away from state-dependent strategies of transformation, by recognizing the power of shared molecular economies that constitute the practices of everyday life in large parts of the world. Such a restructuring alone can enable us to find the resources for a new and ecologically sound way of thinking about an egalitarian future. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *[[END OF NEWSLETTER]] * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: