Anticolonial Hauntings: The Past as Inheritance, The Present as Obligation

Anticolonial Hauntings: The Past as Inheritance, The Present as Obligation marks the first of Borderlines’ Conversations Series, which seeks to discuss common themes from books on the study of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East by putting authors in conversation with each other. In this conversation, we discuss Elleni Centime Zeleke’s Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production 1964-2016, Chris Moffat’s India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh, and Sara Salem’s Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony.

ConversationsBorderlines CSSAAMEOctober 8, 2020conversation, South Asia, middle east, africa

The Progressive Artists' Group & the ‘Idea of India’

Every lover of Indian art knows this story: in 1947, in the immediate aftermath of India’s independence from British rule, six firebrands united in Bombay to forge a modern art for the newly free nation. They were the Progressive Artists’ Group (also known as ‘the PAG’). What does the PAG’s commitment to a heterogenous nation; a multi-cultural past have to offer us today? Art historians Karin Zitzewitz (KZ), Sonal Khullar (SK) and Zehra Jumabhoy (ZJ) unpack the loaded and inter-connected complexities of the modern and the secular given the trajectories of nation-building and cosmopolitanism in the art of those associated with the PAG.

ConversationsBorderlines CSSAAMEOctober 9, 2019interview, art, history, Progressive Artists' Group, South Asia