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From: "Frank Conlon" <
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Sent: Friday, November 04, 2011 9:18 PM
Subject: H-ASIA: CONF Workshop on South Asian Governmentalities, Delhi,
November, 2011
> H-ASIA
> November 4, 2011
>
> NEXT WEEK Workshop on South Asian Governmentalities, Delhi, November 11,
> 2011
> *****************************************************************
> From: Deana Heath <heathdeana@gmail.com>
>
> Re-appraising Governmentality as a Mode of Power in Colonial and
> Post-Colonial South Asia
>
> November 11, 2011
>
> Jawarhalal Nehru Institute for Advanced Studies, JNU
>
>
> Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, governmental rationality
> (?governmentality?) has become central to understanding power not simply
> as
> repression but as an epistemological phenomenon that normatively produces
> subjects. Operating through a variety of institutions, discourses,
> procedures and analyses, this form of power employs ?rational? principles
> to regulate the bodies of those subjected to it in order to produce a
> well-managed and productive population. At its most powerful it generates
> an identification of interests between the domination of others and of the
> self in order to ensure that subjects transform themselves in an
> "improving" direction. In the process it serves to construct the normative
> regularities of civil society.
>
> The concept of governmentality has exerted an ever growing influence in
> South Asian studies, for scholars working on both colonial and
> post-colonial contexts. It has inspired South Asian work on ?deep
> democracy? and urban governmentality (Appadurai, 2002), the politics of
> the
> governed (Chatterjee, 2004), the Indian public sphere and economy
> (Kalpagam,
> 2000, 2002), agrarian capital (Gidwani, 2008), cinema and the end of
> empire (Jaikumar, 2006), knowledge transfer and urban politics (McFarlane,
> 2011), colonial urbanism (Legg, 2007), health and hygiene (Heath, 2010),
> aesthetics and slum politics (Ghertner, 2010), gender and imperial social
> formations (Sinha, 2006), the colonial economy (Birla, 2009, Goswami,
> 2004), and race and violence (Kolsky, 2010). Such works have raised
> governmentality to the status of near-orthodoxy for much South Asian
> research. This has increased the scope and depth of research materials
> being brought to light, and has in turn provided substantial reflection on
> the core methodological and analytical questions at the heart of
> postcolonial governmentality studies,
> particularly the applicability of Foucault?s musings outside Europe or in
> the present, and the compatibility of Foucault?s work with that inspired
> by
> Marx, the Subaltern Studies group, or development studies.
>
>
> The goal of this workshop is to explore some of the myriad questions that
> remain about the nature of governmental power in South Asia including:
> how
> to consider violence and sovereign powers within the power geometries of
> governmentality? How to consider the affectual-, aesthetic- and
> neuro-politics of the governmental? How to think beyond neo-liberalism?
> How
> to re-engage with subaltern concepts of silencing, memory, methodology and
> fragments in postcolonial governmentality studies? How to consider the
> mobility of imperial or international governmentalities?
>
>
> Programme
>
> 10:00-12:00 Panel I: Scales of Governmentality: The Social, Political and
> Beyond
>
> Steve Legg *(*Associate Professor, School of Geography, University of
> Nottingham) - ?Scale and
>
> Governmentality: Nature, Networks and Nominalism?
>
> Prathama Banerjee (Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) -
> ?The
> Social & the Political: Thoughts on governmentality, ungovernability and
> democracy in
> India?
>
> Asha Sarangi (Associate Professor, Centre for Political Studies, JNU) -
> Discussant
>
>
> 12:00-1:00 Lunch*
>
>
> 1:00-3:00 Panel II: Citizenship and Governance
>
>
> Anupama Roy (Associate Professor, Centre for Political Studies, JNU) -
> "Liminal and Legible: Tracing the Topological Terrain of Citizenship in
> the 1950s?"
>
> Aditya Nigam (Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies)
> - "Beyond Governmentality: Languages of Politics, Languages of Corruption"
>
> Nivedita Menon (Professor, Centre for Comparative Politics and Political
> Theory, JNU)
>
> Discussant
>
>
> 3:30-5:00 Round Table: "Re-Appraising South Asian Governmentalit(ies)
>
> Chair, Deana Heath (ICCR Senior Fellow, Department of History, Delhi
> University)
>
>
>
> * *
>
> *Paper Abstracts*
>
> * *
>
> *?Scale and Governmentality: Nature, Networks and Nominalism? *
>
>
>
> *Steve Legg *
>
>
>
> This paper will use Foucault?s Birth of Biopolitics lecture course to
> outline a methodology that helps us consider scales of governmentality
> beyond the micro and the level of the state. It argues at the heart of
> Foucault?s governmentality lectures is a cautionary analytical tale
> against
> the impression of ?natural? orders, whether social, economic, cultural and
> demographic. Within his lectures, I suggest, Foucault?s proposed two
> methodologies for countering naturalistic thought. Firstly, that we pay
> attention to the labour that goes into constructing networks of varying
> lengths and durations. Secondly, that he draws our attention to
> nominalism;
> to naming-effects. These two perspectives on apparatuses of security help
> us understand how naturalistic impressions are created: for instance, the
> idea of the self regulating free market, population, society or culture.
> This methodology has informed my recent attempt to think about the
> regulation of prostitution in interwar India. I examine the suppressionist
> movement as dependent on networks and naming-effects that have local,
> national, imperial and international manifestations, but which focus
> relentlessly on the brothel as a risk and problem for cities, states,
> empire and the League of Nations.
>
>
>
>
>
> *?The Social & the Political: Thoughts on governmentality,
> ungovernability
> and democracy in **India**?*
>
> * *
>
> Prathama Banerjee
>
>
>
> In this presentation, I will outline a brief history of the
> social-political binary in modern India ? from the mid-19th century to the
> contemporary. I will show how the history of colonial and postcolonial
> India has been a history of a fraught and mutating relationship between
> the
> categories of the social and the political, in which reclaiming the social
> and reclaiming the political have been alternating mobilisatory moves,
> complicating the story of the emergence of the modern regime of ?rule by
> the social?. Such a history, I argue, can inflect our thinking of
> governmentality as a category ? not only through counter-instances of the
> exercise of sovereign power a la Agamben (though that too is very much
> part
> of the story here), but also through the foregrounding of a somewhat
> asymmetrical set of questions, such as that of ungovernability, democracy,
> community, autonomy and selfhood. These latter terms acquired specific
> and radical connotations at the limits, I believe, of the political
> horizon
> instituted by the concept and technique of colonial-modern
> governmentality.
>
>
>
> * *
> *
> *
>
> *?Liminal and Legible: Tracing the Topological Terrain of Citizenship in
> the 1950s?*
>
>
>
> *Anupama Roy *
>
>
>
> This paper is framed around the Citizenship Act of India 1955. It aims to
> be both an exercise in thinking about ways of tracing the life of a law,
> namely the Citizenship Act of India of 1955, as also of re-tracing it in a
> way so as to see how the law as ?state?s emissary?, to use Ranajit Guha?s
> metaphor, may also be relocated in the ?matrix? of historical experience?.
> The
> paper will explore the manner in which ?citizenship? was being framed as a
> specific legal category, through two periods of ?interregnum? or ?legal
> hiatus/vacuum? on citizenship, that is, between the formation of the
> Indian
> nation-state (1947) and the commencement of the Constitution (1950), and
> subsequently between the commencement of the Constitution (1950) and the
> Citizenship Act of India (1955). While tracing the topological terrain of
> citizenship in the moment of interregnum in the law, the paper will show
> how the experience of citizenship for that moment unfolded in
> polyrhythmous
> ways. The interregnum between the enforcement of the Constitution and the
> enactment of the Citizenship Act of 1955 was a period of indeterminate
> citizenship. Yet, it also generated spaces of liminality in the closures
> brought in by the constitutional deadline. The statutory opening up of
> the
> constitutional closures was, however, made possible through the insertion
> of distinct and differential ?categories? into citizenship, putting in
> place a differentiated and graded framework of citizenship. The paper
> will
> examine the files of the Citizenship Section in the Ministry of Home,
> which
> record a range of ?cases? requiring decision on citizenship status of
> people in transition be taken. In this sense, the archive affords a
> convenient site for ?retrieval? of knowledge about the ?innards? of the
> state for that period, the manner in which the separation of powers among
> institutions, their own understanding of these powers, the problem of
> drawing boundaries between and among institutions, and more generally the
> emergence of broad patterns of settling in of institutions and
> institutional practices, were taking place. At the same time, they open
> up
> possibilities for understanding state formative practices, institutional
> ordering and the making of state power and authority, the manner and tools
> through which institutional conversations take place, and the legal
> categories, which are invoked by the state in the task of governing, and
> its practices of rule.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *?Beyond Governmentality: Languages of Politics, Languages of Corruption?*
>
>
>
> *Aditya Nigam *
>
>
>
> This paper will look at certain recent developments in Indian politics
> which impact on crucial arenas of governance and policy-making. Certain
> developments like the Right to Information movement leading up to the
> enactment of the RTI Act, have opened out a whole new avenue of activist
> intervention around issues that are thought to be corrupt practices. The
> fact the acts like the RTI Act (and a host of other legislations underway)
> have been enabled by institutional innovations like the National Advisory
> Council that have no formal legal standing in policy terms but critically
> inflect the way governmental rationalities are shaped, requires us to take
> a fresh look at the framework of governmentality and to what extent it may
> or may not work in this context. This paper is a preliminary exploration
> in
> that direction.
>
> ******************************************************************
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