The Forum on Contemporary Theory has been conducting an intensive Theory/PraxisCourse annually since 2003 for the benefit of scholars across disciplines interested innew developments in Theory and their application. The course includes intensivetextual readings in specific areas, supported by seminars and talks on broader butrelated issues. This Course will be held in Vadodara, Gujarat in collaboration withDepartment of Political Science, Faculty of Arts, The Maharaja Sayajirao University ofBaroda during 9th July – 4th August 2018. The Forum which has completed 28 years ofits existence, is a member of the Consortium of the Humanities Centres andInstitutes (CHCI), so far the only member from South Asia. The Course is organizedaround the following topics to be discussed in-depth by the core faculty, supportedby public lectures and mini-seminars by the invited scholars.

In collaboration with

Department of Political Science,

The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara

9th July – 4th August 2018

Venue

Centre for Contemporary Theory

Vadodara

XVI Theory/Praxis Course

Forum on Contemporary Theory

Course Outlines

(a) Can Subaltern Studies Speak? A Critical Reading of Three Decades of Discourse on and of Subalternists and Subalternity (Faculty: Arjuna Parakrama)

While even detractors would admit that the subalternist intervention in colonial historiography and culturalstudies was both important and influential, ardent supporters must concede that there’s been a decline inboth interest and interesting new work in the field. This course seeks to map key elements of the trajectory ofsubaltern studies as well as critical responses to it over the past three decades, in an attempt to betterunderstand its potential future roles within a “differentially globalized” space. Of particular interest in thisregard will be the examination of subaltern studies’ relationship to Marxism, postcolonial theories andhumanism in the current conjuncture. To foreground the theory-practice unease, major subaltern texts will beread in relation to three contemporary films, short stories and “authentic” narratives each. Courserequirements include a class presentation and short response papers. As a capstone exercise, participants willbe invited to write a 10-page paper, “from a subaltern perspective”, which analyzes a recent sociopoliticalintervention that they feel strongly about, also using alternative sources and methodologies to mainstreamresearch, thereby engaging with the theory of practice, where both elements should bring each other to crisis.

While detractors would admit that the subalternist intervention in colonial historiography and cultural studieswas both important and influential, even ardent acolytes will concede that there’s been a decline in bothinterest and interesting new work in the field. This course seeks to examine the ways in which subalternstudies has perceived itself and has been understood by others during the past three decades, in order tobetter predict its future trajectory. Thus, subaltern theory will be subjected to a discourse study, theassumption being that its reception and reproduction, both complex discursive processes, are(mis)appropriations of power/knowledge in globalised space.

Since the public inauguration of Subaltern Studies in the early 1980s, and particularly with Ranajit Guha’s“manifesto” in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (1982) this loosely-knit groupof Indian historians and cultural theorists enjoyed a two-decade-long wave of popularity in Indian and Anglo-US academe. Many imitations and applications were spawned during this period, even the inner circle of theSubaltern Studies Collective grew to around 15 amidst much soul-searching [See Hardiman 1986], andincluded adherents in the most prestigious US and Australian universities.Caricature accounts had US graduatestudents looking for subalterns in every nook and cranny, and the crudest misunderstandings degenerated intocelebrations of primitivism and the romanticizing of marginality.

To risk a generalization that this course will unpack, at a more serious level the British and US responses toSubaltern Studies have been markedly divergent because each sees different aspects as its core content. Whilethe first response dealt almost exclusively with colonial historiography, this was quickly followed by a literarycritical appropriation of Subaltern Studies which gradually became the one of the trendiest methodologies inUS English Departments. Throughout this period the definition of the term “subaltern” came under constantscrutiny and regular revision, a discursive arena that will be meticulously mapped in our readings.

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Subaltern Studies’ origins as a critical engagement with Marxism is well-known. Hence, serious opposition toSubaltern Studies has most consistently come from the traditional left which argues that revolutionarystruggle is being diverted to over-nuanced abstractions and obscurantist theory. A related major strand ofcriticism exemplified by members of the Cambridge School held that the Subalternists have nothing new tooffer which either (British) Marxists and/or Indian historians had not discussed earlier. A rising antagonismfrom within India, including by a few former members of the Collective such as Sumit Sarkar, has critiquedwhat it perceives as the post-structuralist turn of later subaltern work. However, the early excitement, bothpro and con has diminished, and during the last five or so years the output and interest in Subalternity hasreached a low ebb, prompting some critics to express the view that it was merely a fad whose heyday wasirrevocably past. We will track these changes in terms of their over-arching conceptual ramifications in thecontext of the global financial crisis and the rise of ethno-nationalist conflict and reconstitution of new socialmovements.

This course seeks to map the trajectory of subaltern studies as well as critical responses to it over the pastthree decades, in the attempt to theorize future roles for this intellectual movement. Of particular interest inthis regard will be the detailed examination of subaltern studies relationship to Marxism and postcolonialtheories in the current conjuncture. The unabashedly elite status of subaltern scholars and the disciplinaryprivileging of India (even within South Asia) will also be scrutinized to identify how this gets played out in theiranalysis and presentation.

As a capstone exercise, participants will be invited to present a preliminary analysis, from a subalternperspective, of a (contemporary or past) intervention of struggle or resistance that they feel strongly about,which should include the use of alternative sources and methodologies to mainstream research. See, forinstance, the essays by Sarkar, O’Hanlon, Washbrook, Chandravarkar, Bayley and Brass convenientlyreproduced in Mapping Subaltern Studies. The EPW debates on subaltern studies, which will be studied inthe course, provides a more engaged public account of the political and epistemological issues involved.

(b) Rhetoric as a Western Intellectual Tradition and its Relation to Philosophy, Politics and Poetics (Faculty: Dilip Gaonkar)

This mini-course will approach “rhetoric as a Western intellectual tradition” from a “presentist” perspective.And that present is modernity itself. Hence, the question: how might one approach and understand rhetoric(variously characterized as—an intellectual tradition, a vocation, a discipline, a practice, an imaginary and soon) from the standpoint of modernity.

There are three interlinked moments in the western rhetorical tradition preceding the onset of modernityproper: the Greek enlightenment, the Roman Republic, and medieval rhetoric in the Christian era whichculminates in the rhetorical project inaugurated by Renaissance humanism. While the Renaissance opens outto the modernity, it also gathers and digests the prior moments reflexively. Renaissance humanists strive tobalance and integrate their pagan learning within a public culture increasingly dominated by Christianity.Thus, the Renaissance humanist rhetoric is fraught with tensions and contradiction that are absent in the twoprior moments, the Greek and the Roman.

Our engagement with rhetoric is more analogous to that of the Renaissance than to the two moments thatprecede it. If the appropriation of the ancients by the Renaissance was complicated by the presence ofChristianity which had steadily penetrated into every aspect of European life and culture through theseemingly slow-moving medieval period, our situation is equally, if not more, complicated by the eruption ofmodernity itself. We are the moderns who are forbidden to cross over to the Renaissance withoutcontinuously negotiating our own long, but rapidly moving modernity. We cannot appropriate the rhetoricaltradition of the Renaissance and before without coming terms with our own modernity. The challenge thatmodernity poses to rhetoric is both intellectual and sociological. One could argue, with some qualifications,that the challenge Christianity posed to rhetoric as it was being recuperated by the Renaissance humanistswas largely conceptual rather than sociological. The Christian doctrine could, as Plato had done before,ideologically marginalize rhetoric to irrelevance, but it would not, and perhaps could not, damage rhetoricsociologically. On the other hand, modernity could and did attempt to evacuate rhetoric sociologically. WhilePlato had feared rhetoric as a nomadic enterprise in the realm of the spirit (words and ideas) and sought todiscipline it conceptually, the modernity project sought to emasculate rhetoric sociologically (i.e. by way ofsystemically embedded instrumental rationality).

Here we might turn to the modern thinkers like Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Vico to seek models forappropriating the rhetorical tradition (or classical rhetoric) for and from our present conjuncture. There aretwo strategies for doing this: First, one can take a quick historical journey from the Sophists to the present-alighting and dwelling at various stations and posts. This conventional strategy is adopted by scholars such asThomas M. Conley (Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 1990), George Kennedy (Classical Rhetoric and itsChristian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, 1980), Laurent Pernot (Rhetoric in Antiquity,2000, 2005) and Brian Vickers (In Defense of Rhetoric, 1988) and many others.

Second, one can approach rhetoric as an intellectual tradition from the standpoint of contemporaryappropriations—such as those of Jacques Derrida on Plato’s Phaedrus, Pau de Man on Nietzsche, HaydenWhite on the nineteenth century historiography, as well as a set of synoptic interpretations of that traditionby scholars such as Kenneth Burke, Roland Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov.

This seminar will try to combine both strategies.

(c) Mini-Course: Postcolonialism and the ‘Nation’ Question (Faculty: RajeswariSunder Rajan)

Why did colonized territories (almost) always re-invent themselves as nations when they achieved politicalindependence? And what happened when they did? How have liberation struggles and decolonization beendefined by the prospect and process of nation-state formation?

This course will explore the extent to which postcolonialism has been defined by the concept of the ‘nation’and, conversely, the ways in which the nation question has been shaped by postcolonialism. Thesetheoretical debates are shaped, as we would expect, by the dominant historical events of the second half ofthe twentieth century, namely the emergence of nearly a hundred new nation-states as a result ofdecolonization in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean (as earlier in Latin America). Our study will therefore also ofnecessity be grounded in empirical, historical case studies.

We will engage three topics from the vast array of issues thrown up by the connections betweendecolonization and nation-state formation:

•The Violence of nation-formation: Zionism and Palestine •Refugees, exiles and immigrants •‘Alternatives’ to the nation

Core Faculty

(a)

Arjuna Parakrama, poet, scholar, and activist, has had over the last thirty years a distinguished academiccareer in Sri Lanka, and he has also done important work with the UN and major international foundations,including receiving prestigious fellowships from the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs, andthe United States Institute of Peace. He is a recipient of a research grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. Atthe University of Colombo he was Head of the English Department and Dean of the Faculty of Arts. At theUniversity of Peradeniya, where he currently serves as the Professor of English, he is also the Director of theCentre for the Study of Human Rights. He has taught as Visiting Professor at the National University ofMalaysia and the University of Pittsburgh, and is a Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe University. As aninter-disciplinary scholar working on critical discourse studies, subalternity, human rights and development,and radical sociolinguistics, he is author of many essays, monographs and books, such as Language andRebellion (London: Katha 1990) and De-Hegemonizing Language Standards: Learning from (Post) ColonialEnglishes about “English” (London: Macmillan, 1995). He believes that academic and activist work mustmutually inform each other, and that neither is of any value unless it is combined with learning-to-learn fromsubaltern groups.

(b)

Dilip Gaonkar is Professor in Rhetoric and Public Culture and the Director of Center for Global Culture andCommunication at Northwestern University. He is also the Director of Center for Transcultural Studies, anindependent scholarly research network concerned with global issues. He was closely associated with thejournal, Public Culture, serving as the Executive Editor (2000-2009) and as Editor (2009-2011). Gaonkar hastwo sets of scholarly interests: rhetoric as an intellectual tradition, both its ancient roots and its contemporarymutations; and, global modernities and their impact on the political. He has published numerous essays onrhetoric, including “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science” that was published along with ten criticalresponses to the essay in a book, Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science,edited by Alan G. Gross and William Keith (1996). Gaonkar has edited a series books on global culturalpolitics: Distribution of the Sensible: Ranciere on Politics and Aesthetics (with Scott Durham, 2019), GlobalizingAmerican Studies (with Brian Edwards, 2010), Alternative Modernities (2001), and Disciplinarity and Dissent inCultural Studies (with Cary Nelson, 1995). He has also edited several special issues of journals: Laclau’s OnPopulist Reason (with Robert Hariman, for Cultural Studies, 2012), Commitments in a Post-FoundationalWorld (with Keith Topper, for Hedgehog Review, 2005), and the following special issues for PublicCulture: Cultures of Democracy (2007), Technologies of Public Persuasion (with Elizabeth Povinelli, 2003),and New Imaginaries (with Benjamin Lee, 2002). He is currently working on a book manuscript on Modernity,Democracy and the Politics of Disorder.

(c)

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan was educated in Bombay and Washington DC. She taught for many years in Indiabefore moving to the U.K. where she was Professorial Fellow at Wolfson College and Reader in the Englishfaculty at the University of Oxford. Dr. Sunder Rajan has been a Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museumand Library and at the Centre for Women's Development Studies, New Delhi; in 2001 she was a Shansi VisitingProfessor at Oberlin College, Ohio. Dr. Sunder Rajan's work spans debates about the relationship betweengender, postcolonialism and culture in India, and addresses issues relating to law, religion, and secularism inthe postcolonial nation. Additionally, she works on British nineteenth-century literature and Anglophonepostcolonial literature. She is a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University.

Sunder Rajan was one of the founding editors of the postcolonial studies journal Interventions, published byRoutledge. She is currently setting up a research project on Postcolonial Print Cultures with Dr. NeelamSrivatsava at Newcastle University (UK) that will bring together scholars from both institutions, along withother scholars from India, the UK, and the USA, to collaborate in a series of workshops to map this new andrapidly growing field of research in postcolonial studies.

Recent publications include 'Zeitgeist and the Literary Text: India, 1947, in Qurratulain Hyder's My Temples,Too, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in Critical Inquiry(Summer 2014). 'Feminism's Futures: TheLimits and Ambitions of Rokeya's Dream,' in Economic and Political Weekly (October 2015), and 'A Woman'sWorth' in Granta (2015). A volume of essays, Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World, jointly editedwith Professors Supriya Chaudhuri, Josephine McDonagh, and Brian Murray is forthcoming (Routledge, 2017).The volume is the product of a three-year international collaboration on a project titled 'Commodities andCultures, 1851-1914', funded by a Leverhulme Network Grant. Dr. Sunder Rajan is currently completing a bookon the post-Midnight's Children Indian novel in English, while starting another (jointly with AnuradhaNeedham) on 'Women in Indian Cinema'.

Organizational Details

Study material will be made available to the participants after their registration; theparticipants are expected to have gone through the material before thecommencement of the Course. Each participant is required to maintain a day-to-daycritical account of the sessions in an academic diary, which will be submitted to thedirector of the program at the end. In addition, each participant is required to make atleast one formal presentation. Both faculty and participants are expected to staytogether in the same venue for greater interaction and exchange between them.

Participation Criteria

Participation in the Course is mainly open to scholars in the humanities and socialsciences, preferably those working toward research degree, but post-graduatestudents and post-doctoral scholars in these disciplines and scholars from thedisciplines outside the humanities and social sciences interested in inter-disciplinarystudies can also apply. A 1000 word essay on why you need to take this course shouldbe submitted along with the application. Maximum number of participants to beselected is 20. The participants are required to attend all the sessions and to stay untilthe end of the program in order to receive the certificate of participation.

Registration Fee

Each participant is required to pay a registration fee of Rs. 20,000/- (Rupees TwentyThousand Only) to the Forum on Contemporary Theory through a bank draft drawn ona bank in Baroda. The registration fee will take care of his/her board and lodging,course fee and other related expenses. The participants will not be paid by theorganizers for their travel.

Deadline for Application

The last date for receiving application for participation is extended to 10th June, 2018.The application may be sent to the Convener of the Course with copies marked to theDirector, Centre for Contemporary Theory, Baroda (prafullakar@gmail.com) and LocalCoordinator. Selection for participation will be made by 15th June, 2018. Selectedcandidates are required to send the bank draft favoring Forum on ContemporaryTheory before 25th June, 2018. Course material will be mailed only after receiving theregistration fee.

Application Format

The following format may be used for the application:

Name: ___________________________________________________________________________

Gender: __________________________________________________________________________

Address (including telephone no. and email ID): _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Institutional Affiliation: _______________________________________________________________

Date of Birth: _______________________________________________________________________

Department: _______________________________________________________________________

Teaching Experience (indicate number of years also) ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Academic Qualifications: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Areas of Research and Teaching: ________________________________________________________

Publications, if any: __________________________________________________________________

Specific Research Topics, if any: ________________________________________________________

Whether registered for Research Degree? __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Whether participated in any Course organized by the Forum on Contemporary Theory? Ifparticipated, when?__________________________________________________________________

A brief statement (1000 words) about what you expect to gain from the Course:__________________________________________________________________________________

Name and Addresses of Two Referees: ___________________________________________________

Date: _________________________ Signature: _______________________________

Address for Correspondence

1. Lajwanti ChataniHead, Department of Political Science Faculty of ArtsThe Maharaja Sayajirao University of BarodaVadodara, GujaratIndia – 390 002.Convener, Forum on Contemporary TheoryC-304, Siddhi Vinayak ComplexBehind Vadodara Railway StationFaramji RoadBaroda, GujaratIndia – 390 007.Email ID: lajwanti.chatani@gmail.com

2. Udayprakash SharmaLocal Coordinator &Academic AssociateForum on Contemporary TheoryC-304, Siddhi Vinayak ComplexBehind Vadodara Railway StationFaramji RoadBaroda, GujaratIndia – 390 007.Email ID: udayprakash.sharma@gmail.com