Workshop Schedule
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 |
