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Today's Topics:

   1. 23.2.2002: Politics as Performance (Mumbai Study Group)

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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 10:49:03 +0530
To: Recipient List Suppressed:;
From: Mumbai Study Group <kshekhar at bol.net.in>
Subject: [Announcements] 23.2.2002: Politics as Performance

Dear Friends:

In our next meeting, we invite you to join a discussion with 
anthropologist Dr THOMAS BLOM HANSEN, author of the recently 
published Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial 
Bombay (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). Dr Hansen will give a 
paper on "POLITICS AS PERMANENT PERFORMANCE: ON THE PRODUCTION OF 
POLITICAL AUTHORITY IN THE LOCALITY".

One of the most fascinating features of democracy anywhere in the 
world - so often ridiculed by sceptics - is its essential 
unpredictability of political outcomes, both as electoral results as 
well as more negotiated compromises. Most predictions of elections 
based on class, caste or past records of parties are wrong and 
electoral results are notoriously unreliable as indexes of the social 
worlds they ideally should reflect. Likewise, the behaviour of 
political parties or governments cannot be inferred from who they 
supposedly represent. Rather than seeing this as results of a flawed 
system of representation, this paper argues that it is an inevitable 
effect of the foregrounding of the visible - the enactment and 
presentation of community, of a cause, of the familiar, as well as 
the threatening though techniques of re-presentation: from the 
festival and the rally, to the performance of public violence, 
manners of speaking, of dress and bodily comportment, of reputations 
and decorations. In this 'politics of the spectacle' or the 
'aestheticization of politics' lies decisive potential of "managing 
the moods" of localities or big city-scapes. Nowhere is this 
demonstrated more clearly than in how Shiv Sena has refined and 
developed a range of these techniques in the course of the last 
thirty years. By drawing on Shiv Sena's 'political performances' - 
both in the city as such and in certain localities, the paper will 
try to outline an understanding of contemporary urban politics that 
is not 'realist' and sociological but instead takes seriously the 
sensuous quality and performative power of spectacles - from the 
massive rally to everyday forms of self-presentation in the slum or 
the street corner.

Dr Thomas Blom Hansen is Reader at the Department of Social 
Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, U.K. Has done research on 
Hindu nationalism and Mumbai in the 1990s, and is currently doing 
research on Indian neighbourhoods in Durban, South Africa. His main 
publications are The Saffron Wave: Hindu Nationalism and Democracy in 
Modern India (Princeton University Press/Oxford University Press 
India, 1999), Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial 
Bombay (Princeton University Press /Permanent Black, 2001). He is 
co-editor with Finn Stepputat of States of Imagination: Ethnographic 
Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Duke University Press, 2001) .

This session will be on SATURDAY 23 FEBRUARY 2002, at 10.00 A.M., on 
the SECOND FLOOR, Rachna Sansad, 278, Shankar Ghanekar Marg, 
Prabhadevi, Mumbai, next to Ravindra Natya Mandir. Phone: 4301024, 
4310807, 4229969; Station: Elphinstone Road (Western Railway); BEST 
Bus: 35, 88, 151, 161, 162, 171, 355, 357, 363, to Ravindra Natya 
Mandir, 91 Ltd, 305 Ltd, A1 and A4 to Prabhadevi.

_____

MUMBAI STUDY GROUP SESSIONS in 2002

9 MARCH 2002
Film Screening of "Jari-Mari: Of Cloth and Other Stories"
Discussion with Surabhi Sharma, Producer and Director

23 MARCH 2002
"Girangaon: The Past, Present and Future of Mumbai's Textile Mills 
and Mill Workers"
Participants to be Announced

13 APRIL 2002
"Gender and Space in Mumbai"
by Shilpa Phadke, Visiting Lecturer in Sociology, Nirmala Niketan 
School of Social Work, Mumbai
and Neera Adarkar, Architect, Adarkar Associates, Mumbai

27 APRIL 2002
"Food Security in Mumbai and Thane: A Study of the Rationing Kruti Samiti"
by Mayank Bhatt, Journalist and Research Associate, Institute of 
Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, U.K.


ABOUT the MUMBAI STUDY GROUP

The MUMBAI STUDY GROUP meets on the second and fourth Saturdays of 
every month, at the Rachana Sansad, Prabhadevi, Mumbai, at 10.00 A.M. 
Our conversations continue through the support extended by Shri 
Pradip Amberkar, Principal of the Academy of Architecture, and Prof 
S.H. Wandrekar, Trustee of the Rachana Sansad.

Conceived as an inclusive and non-partisan forum to foster dialogue 
on urban issues, we have since September 2000 held conversations 
about various historical, political, cultural, social and spatial 
aspects of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Our discussions are open 
and public, no previous membership or affiliation is required. We 
encourage the participation of urban researchers and practitioners, 
experts and non-experts, researchers and students, and all 
individuals, groups and associations in Mumbai to join our 
conversations about the the city.The format we have evolved is to 
host individual presentations or panel discussions in various fields 
of urban theory and practice, and have a moderated and focussed 
discussion from our many practical and professional perspectives: 
whether as architects or planners, lawyers or journalists, artists or 
film-makers, academics or activists.Through such a forum, we hope to 
foster an open community of urban citizens, which clearly situates 
Mumbai in the theories and practices of urbanism globally.

Previous sessions have hosted presentations by the following individuals:

Kalpana Sharma, Associate Editor of The Hindu; Kedar Ghorpade, Senior 
Planner at the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority; Dr 
Marina Pinto, Professor of Public Administration, retired from Mumbai 
University; Dr K. Sita, Professor of Geography, retired from Mumbai 
University, and former Garware Chair Professor at the Tata Institute 
of Social Sciences; Dr Arjun Appadurai, Professor of Anthropology at 
the University of Chicago, Director of Partners for Urban Knowledge 
Action & Research (PUKAR), Mumbai; Rahul Srivastava, Lecturer in 
Sociology at Wilson College; Sandeep Yeole, General Secretary of the 
All-India Pheriwala Vikas Mahasangh; Dr Anjali Monteiro, Professor 
and Head, and  K.P. Jayashankar, Reader, from the Tata Institute of 
Social Sciences Unit for Media and Communications; Dr Sujata Patel, 
Professor and Head, Department of Sociology, University of Pune; Dr 
Mariam Dossal, Head, Department of History, Mumbai University; 
Sucheta Dalal, business journalist and Consulting Editor, Financial 
Express; Dr Arvind Rajagopal, Associate Professor of  Culture and 
Communications at New York University; Dr Gyan Prakash, Professor of 
History at Princeton University, and member of the Subaltern Studies 
Editorial Collective; Dr Sudha Deshpande, Reader in Demography, 
retired from the Department of Economics, Mumbai University and 
former consultant for the World Bank, International Labour 
Organisation, and Bombay Municipal Corporation; Sulakshana Mahajan, 
doctoral candidate at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban 
Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, U.S.A., and former 
Lecturer, Academy of Architecture, Rachana Sansad; Dr Rohini Hensman, 
of the Union Research Group, Mumbai; Mrs Jyoti Mhapsekar, Head 
Librarian, Rachana Sansad and Member, Stree Mukti Sanghatana.

Previous panel discussions have comprised of the following individuals:

S.S. Tinaikar, former Municipal Commissioner of Bombay, Sheela Patel, 
Director of the Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres 
(SPARC), and Bhanu Desai of the Citizens' Forum for the Protection of 
Public Spaces (Citispace) on urban policy making and housing; Shirish 
Patel, civil engineer and urban planner, Pramod Sahasrabuddhe and 
Abhay Godbole, structural engineers on earthquakes and the built form 
of the city; B. Rajaram, Managing Director of Konkan Railway 
Corporation, and Dr P.G. Patankar, from Tata Consultancy Services, 
and former Chairman of the Bombay Electric Supply & Transport 
Undertaking (BEST) on mass public transport alternatives; Ved Segan, 
Vikas Dilawari, and Pankaj Joshi, conservation architects, on the 
social relevance of heritage and conservation architecture; Debi 
Goenka, of the Bombay Environmental Action Group, Professor Sudha 
Srivastava, Dr Geeta Kewalramani, and Dr Dipti Mukherji, of the 
University of Mumbai Department of Geography, on the politics of land 
use, the city's salt pan lands, and the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) 
Act; Nikhil Rao, of the University of Chicago Dept of History, 
Anirudh Paul and Prasad Shetty of  the Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi 
Insitute of Architecture, and members of the various residents 
associations and citizens groups of the Dadar-Matunga, on the 
history, architecture, and formation of middle-class communities in 
these historic neighbourhoods, the first suburbs of Bombay.


CONTACT US

We invite all urban researchers, practitioners, students, and other 
interested individuals to join us in our fortnightly conversations, 
and suggest topics for presentation and discussion. For any more 
information, kindly contact one of the Joint Convenors of the Mumbai 
Study Group: ARVIND ADARKAR, Architect, Researcher and Lecturer, 
Academy of Architecture, Phone 2051834, <adarkars at vsnl.com>; DARRYL 
D'MONTE, Journalist and Writer, 6427088 <darryl at vsnl.com>; SHEKHAR 
KRISHNAN, Coordinator-Associate, Partners for Urban Knowledge Action 
& Research (PUKAR), 4142843, <kshekhar at bol.net.in>; PANKAJ JOSHI, 
Conservation Architect, Lecturer, Academy of Architecture, and PUKAR 
Associate, 8230625, <pjarch at vsnl.com>.


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