ANNUAL LECTURE SERIES
The Centre hosts exceptional international scholars each year for public talks. The series self-consciously curates the cutting edge of diaspora and transnational studies, with our audiences often including a mix of undergraduates, graduate students, alumni, faculty from across the University, and members of the public. Talks are generally 45 minutes long with additional time for questions and answers.
Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty
History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
Beyond the Global: The Planet As A Perspective on Human History
Thursday, October 10, 2019 from 4:00 to 5:30
Room: Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility, 1 Devonshire Place
Reception to follow
This lecture develops a distinction between the globe and the planet to explain why the distinction is important in thinking about the history of the human diaspora in the Anthropocene.
Professor Jonathan Boyarin
Modern Jewish Studies, Cornell University
Race, Religion, Family: Twenty-Five Years After Kiryas Joel
Tuesday, November 19, 2019 from 4:00 to 5:30
Room: JHB100A and 100B, Jackman Humanities Building
The United States Supreme Court’s 1994 decision in Grumet v. Kiryas Joel showed the difficulties of a jurisprudence of religious freedom based on individual rights when it is confronted with the demands of a diasporic, intergenerational collective. 25 years later, the persistence of kin-based, separatist Jewish communities disturbs neat categories of race and religion as bases for claims of right, and undermines standard narratives of the progressive assimilation and “whitening” of Jews in the United States.
Professor Jamie Kreiner
University of Georgia
Pig Work in the Early Middle Ages
Thursday, December 5, 2019
Room: JHB318
Co-sponsored with the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources
In the early medieval West, pigs were the only livestock raised exclusively for their meat. But they were no mere commodity. Pork production depended on pigs’ own laboring of converting almost any sort of organic matter into meat that humans loved. They were also smart and curious animals that were difficult to house and herd. And in the process of managing their pigs, humans of all ranks – swineherds, landowners, and lawmakers – bent their own practices and policies in order to accommodate them.
Professor Namita Dharia
Department of History, Philosophy, and Social Sciences, Rhode Island School of Design
The politics of pyaar (love) in India’s construction industry
Tuesday, January 21, 2020 from 4:00 to 5:30
Room: JHB100, Jackman Humanities Building
Set on a large real estate construction site in India’s National Capital Region, this paper discusses the Hindi word for love—pyaar— and its everyday interpretations and expressions. Graffiti surreptitiously drawn by construction workers serve as aesthetic expressions of life narrations of various classes of workers and connects to the emotions and aesthetics of doing work in construction. Professor Dharia engages with different forms of wall drawings on the architecture under construction to argue that the political economy of the construction industry is undergirded by the politics of pyaar.
Professor Emrah Yildiz
Middle Eastern Studies & Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University
The Traffic in Iranian Pilgrims: Historicity and Sociality of Saint Visitation across the Middle East
Friday, February 7, 2020 from 3:00 to 4:30
Room: JHB100, Jackman Humanities Building
This talk follows the pathways of a ziyarat (saint visitation) route, also known as Hajj-e Fuqara’ (pilgrimage of the poor) from bus stations in Iran through Turkish bazaars in Gaziantep, Turkey to the Sayyida Zainab shrine near Damascus, Syria. I propose that this pilgrimage route can be productively understood as a region-making route. I trace the inter-articulations of saint visitation with contraband commerce circuits. In contrast to those scholars who see in Islamic ritual the pre-determined stage for ethical cultivation and self-making pedagogy, The Traffic with Iranian Pilgrims interprets ritual as a generative dimension of social action and spatial production on a regional scale that exemplifies the historicity and sociality of ritual.
Professor Krishnendu Ray
Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, New York University
Globalization from Below: Towards an Analytics of Fun and a New Kind of Collaborative Critique
Tuesday, February 25, 2020 from 4:00 to 5:30
Room: JHB100, Jackman Humanities Building
In Delhi, as in Toronto and New York, street-food is served mostly by non-natives, migrants from the country to the city, and from city to city. The pleasure of urban street food provides an opening into the politics and poetics of vernacular taste that can disrupt presumptions of good taste with cultural domination. Mazaa in cheap viands such as chaat, kebab, vada pao has the potential to decolonize the palatal and philosophical expectations of gastronomy that are dominant today. Viewed from the bottom up, much of street food is a study of mazaa and poor peoples’ livelihoods, in a matrix of cross-class interests. This presentation takes the case of popular urban food cultures – based on a large transnational collaborative project — to explore questions of liveliness of cities and epistemologies of fun. What are the best ways to register the bottom-up, sensuous materiality and sociability in theory, without falling into the gourmand’s trap of pure apolitical pleasure? It seeks new grounds for a critique of a global hierarchy of taste and globalization from above, and indicates how mazaa can press us towards social justice from below, by seeking better alliances for livelier cities.
Professor Alessandro Portelli *POSTPONED*
Professor of American literature, University of Rome, Sapienza
Guests. Migrant music and new folk cultures in Rome.
Tuesday, March 10, 2020 from 4:00 to 5:30
Room: JHB100, Jackman Humanities Building
The lecture presents the current state of a 10-year field work and archival project dedicated to the music of immigrants in Rome. While still a country of emigration, Italy has also become a country immigrants, and the music that is heard in the streets, the subways, the churches and temples in Rome now comes from Ecuador, Kurdistan, Senegal, Rumania, Ukraine, and more than 25 other countries. While it retains tracts of the cultures of origin, this new urban multicultural folk music has wings as well as roots, and evolves with the impact of the immigration experience, the dialogue with Italian culture as well as the contact with other migrant traditions and cultures. It also changes our concept of folklore, given the different relationships that the various immigrant cultures entertain between folk and popular music. The lecture will be illustrated with musical examples.
Professor Asheesh Kapur Siddique *POSTPONED*
Department of History, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Archives, Expertise, and the Practice of Political Economy in the British Atlantic World
Thursday, March 26, 2020 from 4:00 to 5:30
Room 318, Jackman Humanities Building
RSVP
This talk explores the origins, uses – and demise – of an overlooked technique of producing political economic knowledge in the early modern world: arguing from the authority of official paperwork and administrative archives. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, archival records were powerful sources of policy arguments about government and political economy. Focusing on the early modern British empire, the talk traces the origins of these archival methods; of work in the archives themselves; of their application to governing empire and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and how they empowered a specific form of bureaucratic expert. By the early nineteenth century, however, emerging conceptual divisions between between ‘political economy’ and ‘history’ removed archives from the remit of bureaucratic labor, and centered new forms of technical expertise.
Professor Lynn Itagaki *POSTPONED*
Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Missouri
The Civility of Interracial Trust: Civil Racism from the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion to Trump’s America
Monday, April 6, 2020 from 4:00 to 5:30
Room: JHB318, Jackman Humanities Building
Professor Devin Fergus *POSTPONED*
Department of History, University of Missouri
Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Rise of Racial Inequality
Tuesday, April 7, 2020 from 4:00 to 5:30
Room: JHB100, Jackman Humanities Building
