To think with Sikander about method in these forums—about the everyday craft of a historian, as one might that of an artist—was to call forth “an archive in process, taking place at that moment.” She spoke of the anti-monumentality—the classically minor status—of works on paper, contrasting their putative frailty and insignificance with the revelation, the epiphany, of viewing Mughal-era miniatures in real life—and of reworking them, as in Faiz’s Gift, pictured above. The micrographic details; the colors so intense that they seem to swim, as if the scene were animated; a non-hierarchy of gaze, everything everywhere happening all at once.
“[T]he general neglect of Melaka in historical scholarship, especially for the modern period cannot be denied. This essay responds to this neglect by attempting to fill a particular void about the social history of Melaka. It centrally locates Melaka within the Indian Ocean world by studying the ties it shared with South Asia in terms of convict transportation. Furthermore, it analyses how these inflows altered the very dynamic of the nineteenth century social landscape of Melaka.”
“What we know today as South African photography emerged in 1948”, said the late Okwui Enwezor, a Nigerian and world-renowned curator and art critic. He was referring to the emergence of Drum magazine, a magazine that gave urbanized black South Africans a platform to challenge the hegemonic representation of Africans in the print media. This essay is a critical examination of Enwezor’s claim that 1948 was the start of a unique South African (social) photography.
These historic practices of optimistic anticolonial solidarity may appear alien to a contemporary world not imagined or accounted for by the revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s, a world characterised by political languages and frameworks that have undoubtedly changed. But the traces of an earlier worldmaking remain in the institutional memories and intergenerational revivals of revolutionary forms and horizons. Researching this history, retrieving its traditions, and tracing its afterlives – of collaboration, friendship, and mutual exchange – offers lessons for the meaning of worldmaking today, as a collective practice of transformative solidarity, grounded in a shared belief in the possibility of alternative futures.
“Although our rituals of worship and traditions of religiosity are now performed worldwide on dance stages, we have largely remained excluded from this reconstruction of ‘respectable’ dance.” Such were the viewpoints of the last living Mahari Sashimani Devi, prior to the extinction of this matrilineal community in 2015. Reliant on the experiential perspectives of stigmatized subjects from the marginalia, this article critically analyses the effects of Devadasi abolition laws on the legal status and socio-political positioning of Mahari-Devadasis, who were temple-dancers in the Jagannath Temple of Orissa,and the historical creators of the classical Indian dance-form Odissi.
How did anticolonial worldmaking offer “strategies to mitigate, circumvent, and undo the hierarchies that facilitated domination”, and how did these strategies work in the intellectual, artistic and spiritual realm?
Seeing Bombay/Mumbai through the words of R.B. More is a fascinating challenge to the historical conundrum of archival absence or textual misreading. Narratives about Dalit life in Bombay appear in More’s autobiography through descriptions of spaces hitherto little explored, or documented, especially through histories of performance such as theatre, and songs of protest and persistence that are passed down generations. Wandana Sonalkar’s translation of More’s autobiography is revelatory of More’s own Bombay, a spatial and cultural entity emerging from the places of cultural production he frequented. When describing his early life in the city, Moré leads the reader into these cultural spaces.
In this collage-essay, Josué David Chávez uses data visualization technology to ‘map’ R.B. Moré's recently translated memoirs. By using the text Chavez attempts to visualize possible acts of imagination by Moré as he traversed the chawls of Bombay. Chavez asks how these visuals could have provided Moré with a way to recognize injustices that needed redress but existed beyond the field of legibility for existing models of identity-based justice [cover image: RB More (far left, standing) with his wife, Sitabai, and family. Photo courtesy of Subodh More].
Suraj Gogoi interrogates the tension between ‘theory’ and ‘ground realities’ in writing on the completed yet contested NRC process in India’s North-Eastern state of Assam. Gogoi writes, “the intent of the article is two-fold. First, the article seeks to uncover the ecology of academic work on the background of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process in contemporary Assam, which aims to identify 'illegal' citizens in the Northeast Indian state…Secondly… the various grounds of such critique —underground, overground, background, foreground, groundlessness—will also be explored.”
Based on her research at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, Rohini Shukla outlines the intellectual formations behind B.R. Ambedkar’s education at Columbia. This article explores the impact of Franz Boas, Raymond C. Knox and Wendell T. Bush on the shifting nature of the academic disciplines that Ambedkar studied, and demonstrates their impact on his essay “Castes in India”
I learned from my grandmother and other Iraqi women in the small but growing diaspora community in the mid-1990’s in the Emirates that the telling and retelling of a collected repertoire of life events is a significant process. I learned that a life story can be found in singular moments and daily rituals. I also learned that it is a process both personal and communal, and always profound. The significance of the act of remembering people and their journeys was in the wisdoms and instructions and information inserted into retold life events. Telling life stories in Iraqi women’s gatherings enlisted a sacred attention in me that was simultaneously unimposing and unwavering. Enshrined between the syntax of words and storylines I found the power of memory, recitation, performance, and curation in the reproduction of life through stories.
Central to the Sikh discursive tradition is contestation—debate about authorizing Sikh life, which is necessarily messy, refusing to be sutured into any singular moment. Contestations refuse the settling gestures necessary to enframing the Sikh community. This does not mean we can get away from pictures since, as WJT Mitchell (2005) writes, a picture “refers to the entire situation in which an image has made its appearance” (xiv). As phantoms and disembodied motifs, images appear, retract, and linger in this picture, which is, Mitchell continues a very peculiar and paradoxical creature, both concrete and abstract, both a specific individual thing and a symbolic form that embraces a totality (xvii).
“Negro nature had often asserted itself, but it was after all but human nature. They had never boasted that they were heroes, but they exhibited truly heroic stuff while coping with the varied terrors of the hitherto untrodden and apparently endless wilds of broad Africa.”
- Through the Dark Continent Vol. 2 (1877), Henry Morton Stanley
Plagiarism?
On January 16th, 2014, Congolese filmmaker and director Carolle Maloba wa Maloba, uploaded her documentary film Makala to YouTube. The film dealt with the work of charcoal laborers and the environmental impact that charcoal production was having on Lubumbashi, a city in DRC’s Katanga province. Three years later, Emmaneul Gras’ film of the same title, subject matter, and at times, even similar scenes shot, was released in 2017 by French distributor Les Films du Losange.
In this article, historian Sherene Seikaly reflects on a decade of research, contingent, accidental, and unconsciously autobiographical, to explore archival practices and the writing of history. What happened to a man of capital who survived the catastrophe of 1948? What allows an archive to survive that event? What stories does it record and what does it render invisible? She recounts her experience of stumbling across family papers that carried the story of Naim Cotran as a “man of capital.” She details Naim’s consumerism, his financial investments and property, and his land dispute with his brother, and then traces his experience of dispossession after the Nakba as a refugee in Lebanon.
Through a close-reading of two accounts of boat migration in North Africa, the documentary “Les Sauteurs” and Laila Lalami’s novel “Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits”, Anna Reumert asks how migrants navigate in the nearness of death. Discussing Stefania Pandolfo’s interpretation of “barzakh”, informed by Ibn ‘Arabi’s conception of this as both a bridge and barrier for spiritual and material passage to an elsewhere, Reumert examines how death is anticipated and experienced in zones where migrants are waiting for transit. How is migration experienced for those caught in the barzakh?
Omar Abdel-Ghaffar read’s Al-Suyuti’s Fariq complicating our understanding of three aspects of intellectual labor and property: the concept of tasnif as it relates to creativity and trustworthiness, the concept of ‘amal as an undifferentiated description of labor that transcends the dualism between the manual and the intellectual, and the relationship between author and work as a relationship of access rather than one of production.
A decade is a good time to think about where we are headed in the future. Perhaps we need to take certain seminal ideas and explore them, hone in on certain crucial elements in contemporary prose and poetry, go further into the impact of the “global” on not so “global” literature.
