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Lynching, Violence, and the State in Contemporary India – Inderpal Grewal (Yale University)
November 1, 2018 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Free
Thursday, November 1, 2018
4:00pm
Smathers Library 100
Under the Modi government, Hindu right-wing activists and vigilantes have used Modi-government policies (prohibitions on beef-eating, for example) to target poor Muslim men in order to undercut their economic livelihood, and have circulated narratives of “love-jihad” to lynch Muslim men in relationships with non-Muslim women. At the same time, sexual violence against girls and women (Muslim and Dalit among others) continues unabated (especially since more women and girls are reporting these crimes), because state, polity and insurgent movements are all patriarchal. The talk examines the usefulness of learning from the history of lynching in America, and how we might need additional resources to think about the work of police and media in India today. In particular, the talk will examine how images of what is called “communal” violence (antagonisms and violence between hegemonically defined religious identities) enable new ways to transnationally consume and produce Islamophobia in the context of Indian diasporas. The talk asks if politics of visual and media culture can contend with these postcolonial images, histories, and struggles.
Inderpal Grewal Professor and Chair in the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is also Professor in the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies Program, the South Asian Studies Council, and affiliate faculty in the American Studies Program. She is the author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Duke University Press, 1996), Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Duke University Press, 2005), and Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First century America (Duke University Press, 2017). With Caren Kaplan, she has written and edited Gender in a Transnational World: Introduction to Women’s Studies (Mc-Graw Hill 2001, 2005) and Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational: Feminist Practices(University of Minnesota Press, 1994). With Victoria Bernal, she has edited Theorizing NGO’s: States, Feminism and Neoliberalism (Duke University Press, 2014).
Her ongoing projects include essays on gender, violence and counterinsurgency in India, and a book project on masculinity and bureaucracy in postcolonial India.
This event is free and open to the public.
Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment) and the Waldo W. Neikirk Professorship.
For more information, please visit http://www.humanities.ufl.edu or contact humanities-center@ufl.edu