Asia brown bag lecture: Ravinder Kaur

NIAS and ADI invite you to a brown bag lecture by Ravinder Kaur from the Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies.

Remixing History - Some Notes from Post-Exotic India

This paper examines the aesthetics of remixing history at the heart of the neoliberal project of India’s image makeover as the ‘land of limitless opportunity’ in the global political economy. I argue that the project of remixing India’s history is predicated upon the ontological fault line of how to retain and erase the original simultaneously while shaping the new in the contemporary global. Taking Incredible India as an example, I show how the original essence of India is revealed and authenticated in the very moment of its disappearance as it is morphed in the aesthetics of the contemporary global. The post-exotic self, I further argue, is not produced by effacing the exotic past, but by condensing, accelerating and fast-forwarding it into a timeless, infinite global present. And in doing so, it also reveals the blueprint of the ongoing visual rearrangement of nation’s civilizational past in the making of new India.

Bio

Ravinder Kaur is Associate Professor of Modern South Asian Studies, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. She also directs the Centre of Global South Asian Studies. She is the author of Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Partition Migrants of Delhi (Oxford 2007) and editor of Religion, Violence and Political Mobilization in Contemporary South Asia (Sage 2005). She has recently co-edited a special issue ‘Governing Difference: Inequality, Inequity and Identity in India and China’, Third World Quarterly 2012. She is currently working on the history of post-reform India and the ways in which India’s image makeover as a global player is performed.

Time: 12 November, 12:00-13:00
Place: NIAS, CSS, room 18.1.08

Feel free to bring your own lunch. There will be coffee/tea.