Friday, October 30th 10:45 – 12:15

Session Room: Studio Theatre

1) Anand Steven, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Refounding nationhood through community development: mobilizing “development” and fearing the Other

In 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party, an ultra-right-wing Hindu nationalist party won the national election. The results signaled an unfettered acceptance of “development.” How did the electorate forego the promise of a secular postcolonial India by embracing the fear of the internal Other in exchange for “development”? I will locate a path through which “development” and “internal Other” have become culturally legible ideas in contemporary India. To accomplish that, I focus on the concept of community development and trace its historical precedents. While seemingly benign, this concept is politically consequential in a democracy that is refounding the meaning of Indian nationhood and peoplehood. I examine its uses in the discourses of planners in early postcolonial India at the national and local levels. At the national level, I analyze the discourse of community development in the First (1951-1956) and Third (1961–1966) National Five Year Plans, while at local level I interrogate the launch of the Urban Community Development (UCD) program in Hyderabad in 1967. In the planners’ community development discourses, I locate the installation of “banal nationalism.” In defining the boundaries of the community, “backwardness” is identified, and the internal Other is constructed. In the case of UCD in Hyderabad, planning discourses construct Muslims as the internal Other and locate slums as “backward” sites. Development discourses evoke a desire for social mobility among the citizens of a nation, where aspiring “development” itself becomes a symbol of national culture. Community development discourses foster gendered subjectivities that embrace national “development” and push for social homogeneity through community integration initiatives. By illustrating the links between local community development and “banal nationalism,” I argue that internal Othering is achieved through seemingly innocuous community integration programs setting a historical precedent for fearing the internal Other.

2) Shazia Nasir​, Kent State University
Establishing Objective Identities and Nations through Modernist Subjectivity

Stephan Dedalus in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man contemplates encountering “the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my [his] soul the uncreated conscience of my [his] race.” He connects the “reality of experience” to an uncertain future action that would take place in his “soul,” thereby linking the real with the subjective. I argue that the modernist exploration into the subjective leads to reification of the objective—identities such as nations and entities such as the nation state (Lewis, 2000 and Conversi, 2012). While modernism engages with the inner and shapes the outer (the nation), the outer (the nation) also shapes it as manifest in Dedalus’ narrative.

My concern is modernism’s relation to nationalism as it evolved in Britain and impacted its colony, India, and its role in influencing Indian writers in redefining their identity, imagining new nations, and creating nation-states in a post-colonial consequence. To do this, I will study the Muslim poet-philosopher of colonial India, Allama Iqbal, whose vision of Muslims as a traditionally distinct nation became the generative source for the creation of Pakistan.

Modernism’s ability to encompass the sphere of individual autonomy and the collective nation state is reflected in Iqbal’s call for redefining the nation that has a correspondence in the thinking of Joyce. Both Joyce and Iqbal enter the recesses of the subjective, the soul, the belief, to create the objective, the nation, the identity. Dedalus’ experience is coterminous with Iqbal’s search for a new identity because it emanates from a heuristic exploration of his philosophy of the self that is coeval with Nietzsche’s process of selbstuberwindung. As Joyce and Iqbal are contemporaries sharing the experience of colonization, I will establish a common currency in their rhetoric for forging identities.
 
3) Michael Shirzadian, The Ohio State University
‘The thought of the two of you together brings such tears of joy to my eyes': Partition, Nationalism and Technological Utopianism in Kamilia Shamsie’s Kartography,

This article evaluates utopian conceptions of nationalism, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism via Kamilia Shamsie’s 2004 novel Kartography.  Many critics have engaged Shamsie’s Kartography as a text illustrating the psychological and political effects of nationalism and war, especially as it manifested in the South Asian crisis of 1971. Drawing from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, critics have argued that Kartography serves as allegory for the politics of partition which divided Pakistan and Bangladesh—through characters Raheen and Karim, respectively—in 1971’s broader South Asian crisis.

Few critics, however, have engaged Shamsie’s conclusion seriously, breaking down the sense of technological utopianism which Kartography’s pre-dot-com crash characters, especially Karim, display as the novel closes.  And fewer critics, if any, have linked the politics of partition and Karim’s guarded optimism to the novel’s formal elements of fragmentation and contiguity at work throughout.  This article indexes the novel's formal elements to its competing conceptions of nationalism and transnationalism, allegorized through Raheen, Karim, and their complex relationship.  And borrowing from the theoretical work of Howard Rheingold and George P. Landow, this article reads Karim’s desire to create a hypertextual map as a creative response to the divisive politics of partition which western imperialism and colonialism had injected in the South Asian region via competing nationalisms.  In so doing, the article catalogues that sense of optimism which contemporary network theorists have long since abandoned.  By locating the kind of potential which inheres in hyperspace, Karim might still offer progressive thinkers a strategy to set aside technological cynicism and play, subversively, with a tainted form.