[Reader-list] Call for Papers: Exploring the Margins - JNU, New Delhi -- Abstracts by July 15

[Chintan]

 ---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Aswathy



*History Association*

*Centre for Historical Studies *

*Jawaharlal Nehru University*

*New Delhi*


*Exploring the Margins*

*27 – 29 August 2009*

To explore the margins is to simultaneously open up the unexplored, the
un-thought, the novel. It is to explore how the horizons and boundaries of
history are defined. As such, it is an effort to move the discipline onto
new themes, to chart out the topography of the discipline and ask why the
map looks the way it does. After all, the creation of margins is a process
of delineation of the centre. What effects does the pattern of
marginalization have on the constitution of the discipline? What does the
process of marginalization reveal about the politics of knowledge?

Through the conference we hope to create a space where research at the
‘frontiers’ of the discipline can be shared. In a fairly typical double
silencing, people who do not come under the gaze of the state, whose lives
survive only in fragmentary traces from the past, also escape the attention
of historians. This is as true of the nomadic and hill peoples on the
outskirts of settled-agricultural zones as it is of women, lower castes and
people with alternative sexualities. Exploring these and other marginalized
histories is not merely filling out the historical record; it is also,
inextricably, an act of resistance and breaking of silences.

Where views *of* the margins might bring up new pictures, views *from *the
margin could productively defamiliarize established visions of history.
Political power studied not through courtly chronicles, but folk songs, for
instance, could not only texture our sense of power but also give us a
nuanced idea of the politics of representation that shape these chronicles.
Exploring the margins could lay bare the seamier consequences of
development, destabilizing histories that see an inexorable march of
progress through canonical stages of ‘civilization’, the West providing the
model of development to which all other histories must conform. Established
periodizations often act as templates that mould historiography around the
study of states or ‘modes of production,’ unconsciously guiding the
historian’s gaze. Thus, entire regions and ways of life might slip off the
historiographical landscape without much notice.

But historiography has also created methodological canons. The Rankean
archival study, for instance, remains the quintessential historiographical
mode. Such an enterprise, pursued in unselfconscious mode aligns the
historian’s voice with that of the state. The need to study the margin would
necessitate an analysis of the silences of sources, a necessary preliminary
to reading them ‘against the grain.’ But new kinds of sources could also be
explored. Visual representations – buildings, paintings, calendars, posters,
cartoons, photographs, films – have been marginal to historiographical
practice in India thus far. In the conference we hope to explore the
possibilities these might hold out for deepening our sense, among other
things, of the workings of cultural production and political representation.
Oral history is another methodological orientation that carries within it
the possibility of providing striking counter-narratives and recovering
marginal voices.

What follows is a set of suggested themes that should not be taken as a
comprehensive list. These themes are aimed at no particular period of Indian
history – ancient, medieval or modern – and we hope to have papers
representing all streams at the conference.






*Sub-themes:*

*I Rethinking Spaces*

The metaphor of ‘margins,’ is at its core a spatial one. Exploration of this
dimension holds a number of possibilities.

Conventional histories of South Asia have been framed around certain
regional ‘centres’. Modern boundaries of nation-states have been taken as
given and as a result, the focus has been on the national histories, and
regions enter history only in relation to the nation. Further, some regions
– seen as politically or economically important or productive – are given
greater emphasis. By viewing the region through the optic of the margin, we
seek to bring greater attention to regions regarded as unimportant by
historiography: for instance, the history of the northeastern part of India
has been directed by a centripetal, nationalist pull, visible in the very
term used for the region. One way of displacing such a pull is by
integrating it with ecologies and economies to its east. An examination of
the categories through which the northeast has been represented, such as the
division of between hills and plains, castes and tribes might usefully
illuminate the specificities of colonialism in its diverse spatial settings.


Further, specialization could itself be a process of marginalization: a
means, for instance in the village, to enunciate hierarchies and enact
deprivations. Nevertheless, such spaces could also become staging points for
resistances and the imagination of alternatives. Marginal spaces in the
city, for instance, have been interestingly deployed in classic Bollywood
films from the 1970s and 80s. Through this theme, we will attempt to explore
spaces beyond the centre, liminal spaces in-between, and inner and outer
frontiers.

*II Economy of Margins: Agriculture, Trade, Industry and Labour*

There has been a longstanding historiographical concern with looking at the
ways in which economic development has operated for the poor and
marginalized. However, this concern itself has set the parameters for how
the economy and production are conceptualized. Fuller explorations
necessitate re-conceptualization of agriculture, trade, work and
work-places, and the categories through which labour has been understood.
This entails a more nuanced understanding of how capital works differently
in different locations, and how resistance too is accordingly shaped and
expressed. Recent work has attempted to move beyond the space of farms and
factories and the categories of peasants and workers in order to accord
greater recognition to the multiple sites of work and production and the
multiple identities of labour. For instance, the life of maritime labour
aboard ships as lascars has come to the attention of the historians, going
beyond definitions of work and labour bound by land. Another crucial site is
that of the household for it stands at the critical interface of labour and
gender. A study of household labour not only shifts focus to a new site of
labour but also brings to attention the gendered nature of such a site.
Similarly, there has been an attempt to integrate forests and farms, rivers
and fisheries, peasants and tribes within the same conceptual field.
Histories of fishers, peddlers, migrant labour – who had all been
marginalized in earlier historiography – are now being written, and through
this theme, we hope to foreground such histories.

*III Representing the centre, constituting the margins:  text, visuals,
landscape*

Margins are often brought into effect through representation.
Representation, as we understand, is an act of power. By reading
representations in a different way, we could understand what representations
mean and do, how they are linked to and shaped by power and ideology. Our
concern, then, is with the production of representations in contexts defined
by macro-processes such as feudalism, colonialism and capitalism, and how
they come to serve as sites of both power and contestation. These
representations may be visual or textual, oral or architectural. **




*IV Resisting discourse*

At the level of politics, for instance, the state seems to stand firmly at
the centre of social experience. Its visions of order, its definitions of
disorder and its vocal and archival   disseminations of ideology are all
mobilized to create the effect of power. However, the political as seen
through the optic of the margin shifts focus to other structures of
authority, working at times in tandem with the state and at other times
against it, such as jati panchayats, even when it produces power.

Since the 1980s, there has been a recognition of the discursive
articulations of colonial power. Notwithstanding the new emphasis that this
has brought to marginal expressions of resistance, it has tended to look at
colonial power in a unitary fashion. Rethinking the margins from within, we
propose to consider more carefully dissonances within colonial discourses of
power, as recognition of the variety within these discourses.


*V Memory, history and placing the margin*

Memory, in a way, has been marginal to the writing of Indian history. This
marginalization is a result of the binary posed between history, seen as the
repository of authentic facts, and memory, being prone to subjective
appropriations and therefore unstable. There is also a parallel binary: the
textual, seen usually as the site of valid, fixed and objective knowledge,
and the oral, the domain of subjectivity and ambiguity. Could we not, on the
other hand, emphasize that all subjectivities are historically created and
memory is a part of this very process of historical constitution? The way in
which memory is constructed reveals how groups or individuals negotiate with
certain historical or social processes. Memory is then seen as a contested
site of self-fashioning and identity-making. For instance, work on the
memory of refugees and their negotiation with a traumatic past in settings
such as the partition draws attention to this engagement with memory in
understanding the past. Similarly, historians have also explored the
institutionalization of memory by the nation-state, and the memory of other
groups that serve as a counter-point to a nationalist narrative of history.


*VI Relocating the Self: Religion, Caste, Gender*

Questions of religion, caste and gender have been at the focus of much
historical work. However history writing very often continues to operate
within homogenizing categories such as Hinduism or Islam, while religious
beliefs and practices of sects and communities that fall outside these
dominant forms appear unintelligible or insignificant. Castes too are often
mapped onto communities in a way that homogenizes differences, suppressing
the variety of ways in which different social groups live their particular
lives, and form themselves around specific beliefs and practices. In
exploring issues of gender, once again, we see the problem of operating
through the optics of dominant structures, of discovering everywhere the
inexorable operation of patriarchy. In recovering the history of women we
cannot end up marginalizing them from history, denying them agency and
voice. An exploration of this theme will help us rethink the history of
religious sects, caste-based social protest, and issues around gender.

~


Those who wish to contribute papers at the conference should send detailed,
1000-word abstracts by 15 July 2009. Participants selected after the process
of review will have to send in the complete paper definitely by 10 August
2009. Each participant at the conference will be given 20 minutes to present
his/her paper, and the discussion of each session will be led by a
discussant. Participants will be provided accommodation for four nights (26
– 29 August 2009), as well as three-tier AC train fare.
Please address all correspondence to:
*exploringthemargins at gmail.com*<exploringthemargins at gmail.com>