Asia Week – Celebrating the Vibrant Tapestry of Asia

Commercial cinema has been among the most powerful vectors of social and aesthetic modernization in South Asia. So argues Iftikhar Dadi in his provocative examination of cinema produced between 1956 and 1969—the long sixties—in Lahore, Pakistan, following the 1947 Partition of South Asia.

These films drew freely from Bengali performance traditions, Hindu mythology, Parsi theater, Sufi conceptions of the self, Urdu lyric poetry, and Hollywood musicals, bringing these traditions into dialogue with melodrama and neorealism. Examining this layered context offers insights into a period of rapid modernization and into cultural affiliation in the South Asian present, when frameworks of multiplicity and plurality are in jeopardy.

Welcome to an engaging and informative introduction to the wealth of possibilities awaiting you at the University of Copenhagen. We invite you to hear from several of the Asian studies alumni - their experiences of UCPH, and how their career path has flourished since being here.

You will also hear from current students who will come with good tips and insights into engaging with Asia both within and outside of the university walls, and how this has enriched their academic and university experience.

Finally, we will share some of the other projects on Asia that are happening here at UCPH which you can get involved in. 

This discussion is guided by a special issue of southasiadisasters.net produced by the speakers, which aims to explore postcolonial futures for disaster risk reduction in South Asia. It will offer pathways towards thinking of disaster risk and how to enhance people’s everyday life and livelihoods away from the dogma of Western concepts, frameworks, methodologies and tools.

Case studies from around the region will showcase how we can reinterpret harm and hardship beyond the sole concepts of hazard, vulnerability, resilience, etc. These case studies will further document how people deal with suffering throughout their lives. They will also provide examples of alternative approaches to alleviate harm and hardship that are genuinely grounded in local understanding of the world.

The Kenneth G. Zysk Indological Manuscript Collection at ToRS invites the public into a world of unique and rarely seen primary sources invoking more than 3000 years of intellectual history in South Asia. The manuscripts were collected from Brahmin families in North India and date from the 16th century onwards.

They are written in Sanskrit and Hindi and cover a wide range of genres from law, philosophy, and science to tantra, yoga, and poetry. They also include several maps, charts, and diagrams together with numerous performative ritual texts of great importance for our understanding of everyday religious practices.

The event will begin with a brief presentation of the collection and its inherent research potential. It will continue with a guided tour through a small exhibition of select manuscripts. Participants will learn about the scribes who produced the manuscripts and the conventions they followed in presenting them to the reader.

The collection website can be visited at https://ccrs.ku.dk/research/centres-and-projects/zysk

What does life in the highlands of Central Asia look like today? How do the people of this region express their sense of identity, continuity and belonging in the face of historical, cultural and economic changes? How can we, as Western audiences, gain a deeper understanding of their living history and reality?

These are some of the questions that the group exhibition ASIA Inside Out aims to explore through the eyes of two local documentary photographers, Guliza Kyzy Urustambek and Danil Usmanov, who focus on capturing life in the remote, mountainous regions of Central Asia. The exhibition is a collaboration between IMMART, Asian Dynamics Initiative, and curators Cila Brosius and Abel Alazo.

One of the oldest settlements in Karachi, Lyari has been the site on-going violence between political parties, criminal gangs and law enforcement agencies since the early 2000s. For this reason, Lyari, has been labeled by law enforcement agencies and the media as one of several ‘no-go areas’ in the city. However, residents of Lyari tell a different story, referring to this area as ‘Karachi ki maan’ or the mother of Karachi. For Lyari’s residents, their locality has continuously shifted from being a space of protection against the hostile social and political environment of the city to a space of terror at the hands of local criminal gangs and law enforcement agencies.

While the conflict has gradually subsided since 2013, the state-led Operation came with its own violence with many residents losing family members to extrajudicial killings (‘encounters’). Many others are still in prison for alleged involvement in the gangs. Furthermore, the roots of the conflict—poverty, drugs, and the conflict between political parties—remain factors that shape the area. Hence, while Lyari may officially be at ‘peace’, residents are aware the violent conflict may erupt at any time in the future.

This documentary follows two residents of Lyari, both of whom have lost family members to police encounters. Through telling their stories, the documentary sheds light on the on-going ramifications of violence and to question whether peace has truly been achieved for the people of Lyari.

The post-War liberal consensus is said to have been eroding in the past few years. The pandemic followed by the war in Ukraine made visible new and old fault lines that underpinned growing uncertainty in the global order. Consider the looming specter of a new Cold War and the attendant return of the idea of nonalignment as well as the global south, a turn that heralded the undoing of late twentieth-century globalization. Once imagined as a borderless market for exchange and extraction, a vast inexhaustible commodity, the world now surfaces a range of boundaries and barriers that constrain the millennial march of globalization. It is not just the ongoing reconfiguration of supply chains, decoupling of financial markets, or the search for ever-new sources of energy independence, but also the re-forging of old ideas and alliances that are drawing new frontiers in the global order. Yet, for all resemblances, the twenty-first-century geopolitics and geoeconomics ruptures do not neatly overlap the bipolarity that shaped the mid-twentieth-century. Instead, in this renewed hedging of bets, the nations in the global south and global north alike compete for scarce resources and subscribe to multiple partnerships and affinities in an array of spheres of interest. Put simply, the established certainties of the global north-south or even south-south dynamics, as well as longstanding ideological allegiances, appear to be overshadowed by the pragmatic, hyperrealist pursuit of national interests in a multipolar world. The question then is: what forms of nonalignment or new alignments might be emerging? What does it even mean to be nonaligned or aligned in the current geopolitics and geoeconomics of multiple allegiances and partnerships?

This symposium is an invitation to revisit the old debates and histories – of ideas, conflicts, actors and alliances – that have long framed our understanding of the north-south dynamics. The focus is on the current speculative moment that simultaneously surfaces glimpses of the past and possible visions of the future: from nonalignment to many new alignments which are being forged in the present. The idea is not just to historicize the present but to move away from teleological accounts that tend to overlook manifold material and abstract shifts underway both in the South as well as the North.

The post-War liberal consensus is said to have been eroding in the past few years. The pandemic followed by the war in Ukraine made visible new and old fault lines that underpinned growing uncertainty in the global order. Consider the looming specter of a new Cold War and the attendant return of the idea of nonalignment as well as the global south, a turn that heralded the undoing of late twentieth-century globalization. Once imagined as a borderless market for exchange and extraction, a vast inexhaustible commodity, the world now surfaces a range of boundaries and barriers that constrain the millennial march of globalization. It is not just the ongoing reconfiguration of supply chains, decoupling of financial markets, or the search for ever-new sources of energy independence, but also the re-forging of old ideas and alliances that are drawing new frontiers in the global order. Yet, for all resemblances, the twenty-first-century geopolitics and geoeconomics ruptures do not neatly overlap the bipolarity that shaped the mid-twentieth-century. Instead, in this renewed hedging of bets, the nations in the global south and global north alike compete for scarce resources and subscribe to multiple partnerships and affinities in an array of spheres of interest. Put simply, the established certainties of the global north-south or even south-south dynamics, as well as longstanding ideological allegiances, appear to be overshadowed by the pragmatic, hyperrealist pursuit of national interests in a multipolar world. The question then is: what forms of nonalignment or new alignments might be emerging? What does it even mean to be nonaligned or aligned in the current geopolitics and geoeconomics of multiple allegiances and partnerships?

This symposium is an invitation to revisit the old debates and histories – of ideas, conflicts, actors and alliances – that have long framed our understanding of the north-south dynamics. The focus is on the current speculative moment that simultaneously surfaces glimpses of the past and possible visions of the future: from nonalignment to many new alignments which are being forged in the present. The idea is not just to historicize the present but to move away from teleological accounts that tend to overlook manifold material and abstract shifts underway both in the South as well as the North.