[csaa-forum] Fwd: UTS: IOSARN Annual Lecture 24 Nov 2009 with Prof. Gyan Pandey, "The politics of difference: Reflections on the Dalit and African American struggles"

[Devleena Ghosh]

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From: Devleena Ghosh <Devleena.Ghosh at uts.edu.au<mailto:Devleena.Ghosh at uts.edu.au>>
Date: 5 November 2009 4:54:02 PM AEDT
To: devleena ghosh <Devleena.Ghosh at uts.edu.au<mailto:Devleena.Ghosh at uts.edu.au>>
Subject: UTS: IOSARN Annual Lecture 24 Nov 2009 with Prof. Gyan Pandey, "The politics of difference: Reflections on the Dalit and African American struggles"

Apologies for cross posting

Dear Colleagues,

UTS:IOSARN is pleased to announce their Annual Lecture to be given by

Prof. GYANENDRA PANDEY
(Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History, Emory University, Atlanta)



The politics of difference:
Reflections on the Dalit and African American struggles

The notion of difference suggests variety, indeterminacy, play. In public life, however, the concept has for long been appropriated to notions of cultural minority, following from cultural deviance, in the context of claims to national homogeneity. I want in this lecture to examine the complicated history of this discourse, its deployment and its effects; the multiplicity and ever-changing nature of what are described as minorities and minority positions; and the numerous grids along which these classifications operate. I shall argue that in re-thinking the diverse locations and uses of the proclamation of difference, the example of the classically subaltern communities – dalits, blacks, conquered indigenous populations, women – has something unusual to tell us, given their uncertain and changing status as ‘minorities’, as insiders/outsiders who are essential to the continuance of a given social and economic order, and yet have to be confined to a subordinate or marginalized place within it precisely for the maintenance of established structures and relations of power.

The examples I take up are the Dalit and African American struggles in India and the USA.  What happens to the idea of ‘difference’ – or ‘minority’, to which it is commonly reduced – when it is not already visible as a historically or biologically (or ideologically) established truth, but has instead to be constituted as a political category by the marginalized and the disenfranchised (in the broadest sense of those terms)? What, in a word, are the politics of difference?

Tuesday 24th November, 6 for 6.30pm
UTS, Room 411, Bldg.2, Level 4
Join us for drinks from 6pm.
RSVP: Cornelia.Betzler at uts.edu.au<x-msg://768/Cornelia.Betzler@uts.edu.au>

This is a free public event. All are welcome. Please distribute widely through your networks.

Refreshments will be provided.

Please send RSVP to Cornelia Betzler at uts.edu.au<x-msg://768/Betzler@uts.edu.au>



Gyanendra Pandey, Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History (D.Phil., University of Oxford, 1975), South Asian and postcolonial history; violence, citizenship and marginality; memory and history. He is the author of Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (2006); The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (rev. ed. 2006); The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh: Class, Community and Nation in Northern India, 1920-1940 (rev. ed. 2002); Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2001); and numerous other single authored and collaborative works and articles. The Gyanendra Pandey Omnibus, consisting of three of his books, has been published by Oxford University Press in 2008; and a major edited anthology, Subaltern Citizens and their Histories: Investigations from India and the USA, is to be published by Routledge in summer 2009. He is now working towards two books: a history of subaltern middle class groups, tentatively entitled Genealogies of Prejudice: Notes on the African American and Dalit middle classes; and a study of the autobiographical writings of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and Viola Andrews.

Over the last three years, he has also been working to develop a dialogue between historians and social scientists working on the North and the South. Two international, interdisciplinary workshops on the theme of ‘Subaltern Citizens and their Histories: Investigations from India and the USA’, held at Emory in October 2006 and December 2007, a specially edited guest issue of the postcolonial studies journal, Interventions, that was published in November 2008, and the Routledge anthology mentioned above, are among the first results of this effort.

Gyanendra Pandey was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (1970-73). He is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies project, and editor of the new Routledge book series, Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Before coming to Emory he taught at the University of Delhi and at Johns Hopkins.

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