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How to Count the Multitude: Logics, Mechanisms, and Technologies
Organizer: Bishnupriya Ghosh, University of California, Santa Barbara
Chair: Jyoti Puri, Simmons College
Discussants: Jyoti Puri, Simmons College; Geeta Patel, Wellesley College
The increasing interconnectedness of our world—mostly commonly known as “our phase of globalization”—has shored up highly visible bodies, some marked by their singularity (the transnational icon, the cosmopolitan subject) and others by their communal affiliation (exiles and émigrés, corporate elites, cultural citizens). These bodies command attention, with the rights-bearing citizen whose property, life, and health is protected by the state, and one who appears as the modern rational agent in the free market, appearing as the most basic unit. At a distance from the citizen stands the indistinguishable disenfranchised, always within the reach of state power but not its protections; a subject whose life and livelihood changes with market flux, but who does not qualify for juridical redress. It is this subject lost in multiplicity that is the primary focus of this panel. Focusing on undocumented bodies of differently placed Asian subjects, we ask: what kinds of logics, mechanisms, and technologies are available for capturing such undocumented bodies in contemporary audiovisual, print, and digital media? We take our cue from scholars who have produced a global optic capable of recognizing the bodies of the disenfranchised. Contemporary investigations of the refugee, the camp-dweller, the homo sacer, the subaltern, or the multitude exemplify existing structures of recognition. Our panel pursues such invisible bodies as they erupt across disciplines and historical periods through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Together we consider how artists, writers, activists, lawyers, and filmmakers have variously rendered the bodies of the multitude visible, singular, and intimate.
Discredited Bodies: Of Citizenship and Colonial Indentured Labor
Sukanya Banerjee, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Contrary to the common critical perception that notions of citizenship are formulated within the rarefied realm of elite nationalist politics, this paper foregrounds how the idiom of citizenship was, on occasion, forged through the subaltern site of indentured labor. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, Indian laborers had been exported to various corners of the British Empire to fill the gap in labor that arose in the aftermath of the British Parliaments’ abolition of slavery. The situation of the indentured laborers, who were often ill-treated, especially in white-settler colonies, raised the question of Indian rights to travel and work in different parts of the Empire in ways that etched early formulations of Indian citizenship. This was most evident in late nineteenth century Natal, where the treatment of indentured laborers fueled demands for political rights by the expatriate Indian merchant community. By examining the petitions of Indians in both Natal and India; the writings of M.K.Gandhi, long-time resident of Natal; as well as various archival documents, the paper highlights the triangulated relation between liberal imperial pieties in England, racialized settler sentiments in Natal, and the political anxiety of expatriate Indians. It traces how the compounding of a rhetoric of an emergent bourgeois morality with the arithmetical logic of credit and creditworthiness provided the narrative dynamic for early articulations of Indian citizenship. In doing so, the argument underscores how the presence of indentured laborers at once enabled and brought to crisis formulations of Indian citizenship and the liberal claims forwarded by diasporic Indians across the late-nineteenth century British Empire.
Divine Labors: On Devdasis and Capital Formation in Colonial India
Anjali Arondekar, University of California, Santa Cruz
For gender studies of colonial and post-colonial India, the historical figure of the Devadasi (alternately understood as sex-worker, courtesan, prostitute—literally “maid to the gods.”) profers a complex script, a much-needed shift in the terms through which genealogies of caste and culture can be narrated. Devadasis (particularly in South India) have now become sought after objects of study, fueled by both feminist and state claims to discover and restore sexual difference in India’s past. My paper focuses on a particular Devadasi community in Western Maharashtra to make visible the couplings of colonialism and community formation that undergird such reifications. Even as the Devadasi figure becomes recovered and categorized through the passing of the various Devadasi Acts banning such practices, what falls away is its intimate imbrication with systems of capital and colonialism. As I will demonstrate, it becomes clear that Devadasis held central positions of power in Sultanate and Mughal courts and had the prerogative to collect taxes and duties in particular areas. Such connections to capital and state-formation are repeatedly erased by scholars who avidly traverse archives and geopolitical sites in their quest to connect Devadasis primarily to cultural and artistic histories. By linking terrains of capital, caste and culture in colonial Western India, this paper explores alternate genealogies for the project of Devadasi historiography, and raises some of the following questions: What happens when the establishment of anti-Devadasi laws is read in conversation with the colonial codification of profit and pleasure? What forms of citizenship and subjectivity are being historicized through the figure of the Devadasi?
Tallying Bodies: Arundhati Roy’s Moral Math
Bishnupriya Ghosh, University of California, Santa Barbara
Arundhati Roy shot into the global eye first as the winner of the Booker prize, and quickly evolved into a glamorous transnational icon—the pin-up activist from South Asia. As a highly visible public figure, she inhabits a contradiction: the bearer of singular “star body” lying over her non-fiction (essays, speeches, and interviews) like overexposed film, Royt continually attempts to use that body as screen where she can project the bodies of needy and excluded. My paper begins with Roy’s deliberate turn away from her celebrity, and her consequent efforts at rendering visible the bodies of the disenfranchised in her non-fiction. It is not a body, the character’s body in a literary text, a spectacular body that meets our gaze; but a body count, on the one hand, and corporealized bodies—of sinews, blood, and torture marks—on the other. Despite Roy’s disavowal of her role as fiction writer, I argue that paradoxically it is her writerly capacities that enable her transformation into a vocal activist, a craftsman of ethics, an interpreter of global maladies. She uses her literary craft to fashion a moral compass where ethical questions of redress can be posed without being completely aggrandized to the economics of rational choice. Her moral math not only chronicles the unrecorded but brings home the thud and fall of bodies to national elites through rhetorical play; too close for comfort, the specter of the disenfranchised appears in their backyards, in the bodies of loved ones, and even in the body of the citizen subject.