SOUTH ASIAN LITERARY ASSOCIATION /01 ANNUAL CONFERENCE _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURES IN THE WORLD January -, 2 theWit Chicago /01 N. State St. Chicago, IL =0=01 USA _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS Conference Co-Chairs: Madhurima Chakraborty, Columbia College Chicago Nalini Iyer, Seattle University SALA Conference Schedule/2 SALA Conference Schedule/3 SATURDAY JANUARY M, /012 :0-: PM Lincoln: Executive Committee Meeting DAY 1: SUNDAY, JANUARY , /012 : AM: REGISTRATION DESK OPENS :00-:/ AM Wilde: CONFERENCE COMMENCEMENT ● John C. Hawley, SALA President ● Madhurima Chakraborty, Conference co-chair. “South Asian Literatures in the World.” SESSION : :0-: AM Wilde Locating the Inventions of South Asia—Opening Plenary (Roundtable) The opening, plenary panel for our conference interrogates the many locations—geographical, theoretical, literary textual, and political—in which South Asia continues to be invented, and the consequences of such invention. What have been the contexts in which the idea of South Asia has been invented, and with what consequences? What does it mean to speak of a collective that might, in diaspora, provide a sense of community even though corresponding nations are in political conflict with each other? How do academic programs and institutions shape the discourse of South Asia? How do theoretical or disciplinary academic approaches to South Asia see the opportunities and challenges of such inventions? How can we as academics confront and attend to the blind spots that inhere in regional cultural studies through our scholarship, teaching, programmatic development, and creative endeavors? Chair: Nalini Iyer, Seattle University ● Neilesh Bose, University of Victoria ● Rajani Sudan, Southern Methodist University ● Susan Andrade, University of Pittsburgh ● Ana Cristina Mendes, University of Lisbon, Center for English Studies ● Waseem Anwar, Forman Christian College, Lahore SESSION : :-: AM A Wilde Gender, Environment, and Crisis in South Asian Graphic Narratives (Roundtable) This roundtable addresses how transnational displacement, environmental conflict, minority experience, postcolonial masculinity, and Hindu mythology appear in South Asian graphic narratives. Exploring questions about graphic narratives as a medium as well as a political project, we examine how this medium maps intra-South Asia conflict and community. Unlike the popular Amar Chitra Katha series, the contemporary graphic narrative in South Asia has a critical edge: in this archive, in works by Sarnath Banerjee, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Amruta Patil, and others, gender-based violence, forced migration, multinational corporations, and water wars fissure social experience. Eschewing a North- American diaspora-centric approach, this panel studies how this new archive offers new perspectives on minority experience, transnational displacement, and ethnic conflict. We investigate the graphic narrative as a form that articulates postcolonial modernities. Chair: Kavita Daiya, George Washington University SALA Conference Schedule/4 ● Kavita Daiya, George Washington University. “Migration Stories.” ● Lopamudra Basu, University of Wisconsin-Stout. “Postcolonial Masculinities in Sarnath Banerjee’s Novels.” ● Sukanya Gupta, University of Southern Indiana. “Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri as Text/Image Activism & Cli-Fi.” ● Nidhi Shrivastava, University of Western Ontario. “Priya’s Shakti: Recasting of Familiar Mythological Constructs in Order to Criticize Rape Culture.” B Cibo Matto The Politics of Kashmir Chair: Abdollah Zahiri, Seneca College ● Rituparna Mitra, Marlboro College. “The Ghazal and the Gathering of Worlds in Ali’s ‘The Country Without a Post Office’.” The Anglophone novel has been recognized in much of recent scholarship (Shameem Black, Pheng Cheah) as a world-making genre that forces open ways of “relating and being-with” (Cheah) alternate to the norms that constitute the neo-liberal/colonial order. Anglophone poetry, Amir Mufti reminds us, mediates these transactions and relationships in very different ways that are equally urgent, but less studied (Forget English!). My paper examines the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, with attention to its harnessing of vernacular cosmopolitanisms, by which I mean world systems and historicities that challenge Eurocentric modernities. The worlding of the ghazal has been imbricated historically in ways of “relating and being-with” drawn from encounters between South, West and Central Asia. Kumkum Sangari, among others, urges us to recognize that these exchanges constitute other passages to the secular modern. Ali’s work, I will show, illuminates these very passages. At the same time, Ali’s use of the ghazal (as a structure of feeling transposed into English) mobilizes affective repertoires and histories that challenge nation-statist norms in contemporary South Asia, especially its Partition along religious lines. My reading of Ali’s poems from his collection A Country Without a Post Office, written at the height of the Indian state’s counter-insurgency against Kashmir’s tehreek for azaadi, will be attentive to both these critical projects. I am, moreover, interested in mining the affective and cultural reserves of the ghazal constellation (the complex of emotions evoked, the performative, communal aspects, etc.) to draw out its role in representation of global violence in the post-Cold War era. For instance, poems like “The Correspondent,” bringing together Kashmir and Bosnia, interrogate Eurocentric understandings of trauma and witnessing that privilege universalist humanitarian responses. It allows instead a more complex, comparative understanding of suffering. In sum, the shattered worlds gathered together in Ali’s poetry help reconstitute a global South Asia. ● Wafa Hamid, Lady Shriram College for Women, University of Delhi. “‘Discourses of Silence’: (Re)Writing Cashemere, Kashmir, Kashimir in Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry.” Although India is a site of one of the most populous democracies, it has also been the epicentre of many conflicts. Kashmir has been caught in a vortex of turmoil ever since its accession to the State of India in 1947. State orchestrated violence through draconian laws like AFSPA along with cross-border infiltration have destabilized the society where the intermittent end of physical violence does not actualize peace and people have little agency when the very providers of security become indistinguishable from the repressors. The act of writing, in such times of conflict becomes a continuous transgression questioning the history of Kashmir as not sacrosanct but a narrative consisting of presences and absences. If history dislocates, literature attempts to relocate; if the past is a narrative, philosophy attempts to deconstruct it; if religion is no comfort, poetry offers a redemptive. The paper will focus on the poetry of one such poet, Agha Shahid Ali, whose ghazals in particular "redress the ruptures in history and collective memory". It studies the poet's attempt to trace the complex history of Kashmir and its relations with India to provide a rubric of understanding present. Poetry acts SALA Conference Schedule/5 as a medium of resistance to archive silenced voices. The primary focus is to provide a paradigm for understanding writing as testimony and resistance, a vehicle of affect which inscribes "people/Kashmir" into culture, creating a narrative of the margins. The paper will precisely look at these paradigmatic issues and will try to bring out the impact of poetry of the people who are continually silenced and written over. As reality lies shattered, the poet understands the fissures and fractures in the past along with the impossibility of return while transforming this loss into a redemptive promise through his poetic vision. ● Upasana Dutta, University of Chicago. “The Broken Body, the Stuttering Image: Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir.” Comparisons to Art Spiegelman’s Maus tend to inevitably appear when speaking of Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (henceforth Munnu). Munnu, like Maus, is a graphic novel that deploys the stylistic device of anthropomorphization as a key element in telling the story of a minority beset by great physical and emotional trauma. However, there is a notable way in which Munnu distinguishes itself from Maus precisely in the way in which the former uses this device. Sajad anthropomorphizes hanguls, the Kashmir stag, to represent Kashmiris within the narrative. However, the members of the Indian armed forces, as well as every other individual appearing on the pages of Munnu (Indian journalists, foreign social activists) retain their human form; unlike Maus, where Germans and Jews are pitted off in the traditional predator-prey binary of cat and mouse. This paper undertakes a close reading of anthropomorphization in Munnu, with reference to Spiegelman, and Elaine Scarry’s Body in Pain, to ponder a few questions about the role of the graphic novel in representing the body in a conflict zone. How does the novel create, circulate, and mark lines of demarcation between various iterations of South Asian identity? What does it mean for Kashmiri bodies alone to be shifted from the visual register of human to animal when Munnu makes explicit mention of other animal bodies (crows, dogs, rats) living in the margins? Conversely, what does