Promotional poster

This conference seeks to explore questions of exchange, value and relation across the disciplines and in reference to “South Asia” in the world. From body to household, community to nation state and world system, exchanges are fraught with the intensifying demands of security and moral urgency, laden with the real and spurious promise of wealth, beauty, and enhanced selfhood, and legitimated through proliferating metrics governing information and informality. In the present and, both critical and mindful of the present's demands, in other times, questions of exchange open out to broader matters of concern. They shape debate on government, ethics, and corruption, on aesthetics and on embodiment, and on care and on abandonment through relations involving humans and others. They determine or are determined by borders and regions.  They engage the futures of political thought and political economy. They help us reappraise and reimagine earlier thinking on the formation of  “South Asian Studies” within and across disciplines. 
 
Agenda
Friday, May 8, 2015 
2-5 PM, Panel I - Exchange, Relation , Body

Discussants: Anjali Arondekar (UC Santa Cruz), Lawrence Cohen (UC Berkeley)

  • A Polemics of Equality and the Equivalence of Bodies, William F. Stafford, Jr.
  • Fluid Exchange, Aarti Sethi
  • Exchanges of Mutual Need and the Re-production of Marginality: NGOs and Working-class 
    ​Transmen and ​

    Lesbians in South India, Elizabeth Mount

  • Is Sex Work Sex or is Sex Work Work? Intimate Exchange and the Making of the Sex Worker in Bangalore, Gowri Vijayakumar
  • Friendship as Origin Myth and as History in 17th-19th century South India, Hannah Archambault

5:30- 7 PM​: Keynote Address - Buy Now, Pay Later by Geeta Patel

Saturday, May 9, 2015 

9 - 11 AM​: Panel II - Form, Thing, Culture 

Discussants: Parama Roy (UC Davis), Poulomi Saha (UC Berkeley)
  • Unfolding Gurgaon in Jagannath Panda’s Art, Karin Shankar
  • Morass of Beauty, Soil, and Sea: Aporias of the Colonial ‘Picturesque’ in 19th century India, Mitchell Winter
  • When “Heritage” Hits the Ground: Precariousness and Paradox in Sri Lanka’s “Traditional Industries," Aimée Douglas Caffrey

11:30 - 1:30 PM​: Panel III - Money, Debt, Value

Discussant: Sudipta Sen (UC Davis)
  • Revisiting the 'Great Firm' theory of Mughal decline: The Haribhakti family and banking households in western India, c. 1750-1818, Sudev Sheth
  • Turbulent Tribes, British Rupees: Migrations, Remittances, and Resistances among Afghans in Colonial South Asia, H William Warner
  • Knots of Trade: Promissory Payments in Srinagar’s Wholesale Market, Aditi Saraf
2:30 - 4:30 PM​:  Panel IV - Waste, Milieu, Exchange

Discussants: Sharika Thiranagama (Stanford), Smriti Srinivas (UC Davis)

  • Space, Labor, and Law: The global production of a landscape for ship breaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh and the problem of ‘waste’, Elizabeth Sibilia
  • Contingency and Survivability: Regimes of Precarity in a scrap market in Delhi, Ishani Saraf 
  • Middle Class Waste, Working Class Hands: The Politics of Cleaning and Greening the Garden City, Manisha Anantharaman

4:30 - 5 PM​: Wrap Up

5:30 - 7:30 PM:​ Nautanki: Bringing Back India's Lost Opera by Devendra Sharma