1. What does it mean to invoke the gender of the state? What methodological enclaves are over-determined within analysis of state formation, and what relationship (if any) do they have to a gendered state? What topographies of subalternity are rendered visible in such relationships?

2. How might feminist and queer theory enable us to envision alternate forms of political community, beyond the logic of the state? How might they clarify the switch/slide between the domains of the subaltern and the popular?

Related Article 1, Related Article 2, Related Article 3

Anjali Arondekar, UC Santa Cruz

Kamala Visweswaran, UT Austin

Freya Schiwy, UC Riverside

Bishnupriya Ghosh, UC Santa Barabra

Bhaskar Sarkar, UC Santa Barabra

Moderator: Adriana Johnson, UC Irvine

Sunday, November 5

Paper Session 1: Sovereignty

Moderator: Bhaskar Sarkar, UC Santa Barabra

8:30am

Michael Provence, UC San Diego

"Ottoman Subalterns and Popular Revolt in the Arab East"

8:50 Discussion

9:30

Freya Schiwy, UC Riverside

"Todos Somos Presidentes/We Are All Presidents? Bolivia and the question of the State"

9:50 Discussion

10:30 Tea Break

10:40

Horacio Legras, UC Irvine

“Sovereignty and the Politics of Recognition”

11:00 Discussion

11:40

Daniel Nemser, José Rabasa & Alejandro Reyes, UC Berkeley

“Thinking through the State: The People's Movement in Oaxaca and the Other Campaign”

12:15 Discussion

1:00 Concluding Discussion

1:30 Lunch

2:30 Plenary 2: State and Space

Hannah Arendt described totalitarianism as an iron compression band that “destroys the space between men, removing that prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space”. No less significant is her corresponding metaphor of the “desert” of tyranny, -- “still some kind of space (which) appears like a guarantee of freedom” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 466).

1. What exactly is the nature of space occupied by the state? Is the space of the state the geographical territory, defined by political boundaries? Does it consist of (as in the sum total of) the institutional spaces governed by the state? How historically specific is the relation between state and space?

2. How then may we imagine a space of resistance in relation to the state (inside or outside the state) that would allow us to think beyond the logic of bourgeois nationalism? What constitutes the materiality of such resistance?

José Rabasa, UC Berkeley

Adriana Johnson, UC Irvine

Gauri Viswanathan, Columbia University

Sudipta Sen, UC Davis

Moderator: Cristina Venegas, UC Santa Barbara

4:00 Tea Break

4:15-5:45 Plenary 3: Law, Violence, Sovereignty

1. If we understand violence to be constitutive of state formation, what kind of relation between violence, law, and the popular fosters/deters processes of subalternization?

2. Is there a plural form of sovereignty? What other forms of political community can we cite or imagine that recognize plural sovereignty? Could such a notion of sovereignty provide the possibility of a political that alters the relation between law and violence?

Horacio Legras, UC Irvine

David Lloyd, USC

Paul Amar, UC Santa Barbara

Moderator: Bishnupriya Ghosh, UC Santa Barbara

Monday, November 6

Paper Session 2: Space

Moderator: Paul Amar, UC Santa Barabra

9:00 am

Swati Chattopadhyay, UC Santa Barbara

“The Art of Mobility”

9:20 Discussion

10:00

Nuha Khoury, UC Santa Barbara

“Designing the State, Embroidering the Nation”

10:20 Discussion

11:00 Tea Break

11:10

David Lloyd, USC

"Normalization/Criminalization: Prison Protest and the `Welfare State'"

11:30 Discussion

12:10 Concluding Discussion

12:40 Lunch

2:00 Plenary 4: Statelessness

1. What is the predicament of statelessness? How might we understand the problem of “belonging” in a condition of statelessness? How might statelessness be otherwise useful as an analytic category? Would it, for example, allow us to think of the popular without a relation to state formation?

2. Would conditions of statelessness, as in the Palestinian case, allow us to unhinge or clarify the relation between space and state? Are there historical instances of political community that might be helpful? How might it help us to re-imagine the relation between capital, space, and state (i.e. other than the state as agency that enables the functioning of global capital)?

Richard Falk's response to Saddam Hussein verdict

Nuha Khoury, UC Santa Barbara

Richard Falk, UC Santa Barbara

Michael Provence, UC San Diego

Saree Makdisi, UC Los Angeles

Moderator: Sudipta Sen, UC Davis

4:00-4:15 Tea Break

4:15-5:15 Roundtable: Future agenda

Subaltern-Popular Workshop MRG Members

Past Faculty Workshops e

The Subaltern-Popular Faculty Workshop: “The Body”

University of California, Santa Barbara

May 14-15, 2006

Venue: McCune Conference Room

Sunday, May 14

1:30pm Introduction

Session 1 Moderator: Barbara A. Holdrege, UC Santa Barbara

1:40 pm Bishnupriya Ghosh, UC Santa Barbara, "Exploding the Skin of Taste: Taslima Nasrin's Embodied Public Address" view mag cover

Mandatory Readings for Talk: Habib, Zafar, Other

2:00pm Discussion

2:30pm Anjali Arondekar, UC Santa Cruz, "Time's Corpus: Sexuality, Historiography and the Indian Penal Code"

ABSTRACT

Invocations of time and space are central to legal theorizations of homosexuality in India. From colonial sodomy statutes, to post-colonial anti-sodomy legal reform, homosexuality is recuperated through its attachments to a temporal elsewhere. It is and is not of the"East;" it is and is not of the "West," a legal spectre that resides ambivalently in time and space. In this paper, I examine the critical labor of temporality and spatiality ("in whose time and space?") within legal theorizations of homosexuality, and the genealogical peculiarities that such turns bring. Some of the questions I will raise are: If homosexuality is scripted as paradoxically familiar and unfamiliar, relational and remote, what are the challenges for legal codification? What significance does the overwhelming legal focus on native pederasty during the nineteenth century have for the representations and struggles of contemporary legal reform?

"petition," "dismissal" and "if in reply".

2:50pm Discussion

3:20pm Tea Break

3:30pm Paul Amar, UC Santa Barbara, "New Bodies of Vice: Policing Sex Trafficking and Disenfranchised Erotic Publics in Brazil and Egypt"

4:00pm Discussion

4:30-5:30pm Roundtable Discussion

Monday, May 15

Session 2 Moderator: David Lloyd, USC

9:00am Neferti Tadiar, UC Santa Cruz, "The Sorrows of People: Affective Labor and the Body of Revolution"

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the work of affect in the organization of the social body of the contemporary underground Philippine revolutionary movement and the conduct of armed struggle. Looking at the guerilla novel, Gera [War], and other works of revolutionary literature, film and music, as well as critical accounts of revolutionary life, I consider the political and social uses of loss, suffering, grief, fear and hope, as well the configuration of bodies shaped by these affective forces, in relation to practices of guerilla warfare, revolutionary intelligence and mass mobilization during the height of the 'People's War' from the early 1970s to the 1980s. In the light of a bloody purging of the movement's own ranks in the late 1980s, I examine the differences and continuities that obtained between the affective supports and corporealities of "people's war" and those of the counter-insurgent "total war" carried out by the fascist, militarist Philippine state.

9:20am Discussion

9:50am Sudipta Sen, UC Davis, “A Submissive Body-Polity: Governance, Subordination and the Uses of Fear in Colonial India”

ABSTRACT

A seemingly innocuous Bengali cartoon became well known in the 1870s for raising a specter of native sedition against the British Raj; it was one among a few articles that prompted the passage of the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, which sought to clamp down with some severity on anti-Raj political expression. The cartoon depicted a coolie who lay dead with his wife crying over his body. An English doctor conducted a token post-mortem while the assailant stood indifferently, smoking a cigar. The caricature voiced a long term grievance nursed by many Indians that Europeans had the unquestioned right to assault servants and subordinates, without as much as a reprimand. The familiar defense at a court of law became notorious as the 'spleen theory': the natives of India suffering chronically from malaria, Kala Azar (Leishmaniasis), and 'Dum Dum Fever' developed inordinately enlarged spleens that ruptured at the slightest provocation.

This particular instance of the 'spleen theory' provides the main thematic of this paper, which argues that the routinization of fear was indeed the obverse of exceptional and exemplary violence during episodes of great disorder (such as the Mutiny of 1857) that required measures intended to terrify native subjects. From the very early years of the establishment of the Company Raj in India, physical castigation of servants had been seen as the standard feature of British-Indian society in keeping with similar practices back in England. This essay explores the extension of this norm in the colonial context, advancing the argument that a certain depiction of the weaker and vulnerable Indian body was to become normative and commonplace, both in terms of law and everyday governance. I argue that this socio-pathological construction of the colonial body-polity bears rich clues to the political economy of terror and subordination under colonial rule, underscoring at the same time British anxieties about the vulnerability of the colonial state in the face of native insubordination.

10:10am Discussion

10:40am Tea Break

10:50am Bhaskar Sarkar, UC Santa Barbara,“The National Mise-en-abyme”

11:20am Discussion

11:50-12:50pm Roundtable Discussion