Talk by Camille Frazier

With its emergence as India’s IT Capital, Bengaluru [Bangalore] has experienced exponential growth since the early 1990s. The rapid pace of urbanization has provoked intense ambivalence among members of the urban middle class, many of whom are both beneficiaries and critics of the city’s transformation. As boulevard trees make way for elevated highways, residents of Bengaluru and its outskirts narrate their city as poised at the edge, between the glamour of a globally-connected IT hub and the destruction of a cityscape trapped in unyielding processes of urbanization. This talk explores middle-class narratives and practices of livability to detail a kind of life-making anchored in aspiration yet simultaneously haunted by broader socioeconomic, ecological, and ethical concerns that destabilize estimations of present and future wellbeing. I capture this tension by examining efforts to reconfigure fresh fruit and vegetable supply chains to address middle-class concerns and desires (both experienced and imagined). Food networks figure as sites wherein the effects of a rapidly-developing metropolis are embodied, narrated, and critiqued. Whether through urban gardening workshops or corporate claims-making about “direct” connections with farmers, food offers a critical locus for class-specific mediations of urban livability that shape everyday life. As a form of negotiation over the present and future of the developing city and the lives it supports (and neglects), efforts to rework Bengaluru’s food system highlight the embodied ambivalences of urban transformation and estimations of current and future wellbeing in South Asia and beyond.

Camille Frazier is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Clarkson University. Her ethnographic research explores the concept of livability as a sociopolitical, ecological, and ethical category. She is particularly interested in how changing food networks figure as sites for diverse evaluations of wellbeing. Her current book project examines these themes in the context of Bengaluru, India.

Postcolonial discourse has called into question the historic Western Enlightenment by demonstrating its links to violent colonialism, chattel slavery, Indigenous genocide, and persistent institutional and cultural racism.

Sir Hilary Beckles suggests that the growing global reparatory justice movement—particularly as it emanates from the higher education sector—may present the best potential for an authentic 21st-century Enlightenment. Universities are now deeply researching their role, functions, and legacies within the Atlantic slave complex and exploring where these discursive discoveries, as crimes against humanity, will lead—back into the future or forward against the past.

Join the lecture live in the Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium in Klarman Hall! In-person attendees have the chance to enchange ideas with Beckles during a Q&A session following the lecture. Or join the lecture virtually by registering at eCornell.

About the Speaker

Sir Hilary Beckles, eighth vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies, is a distinguished academic, international thought leader, United Nations committee official, and global public activist in the field of social justice and minority empowerment.

He received his higher education in the United Kingdom and is professor of economic history. He has lectured extensively in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. He has published over 100 peer reviewed essays in scholarly journals and over 13 books on subjects ranging from Atlantic and Caribbean History, to gender relations in the Caribbean, sport development, and popular culture.

Beckles is president of Universities Caribbean, chair of the Caribbean Examinations Council, chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, and advisor on sustainable development to former United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon. He was knighted by the government of Barbados. He has received numerous honorary doctorates from around the world and recently received the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace and Freedom Award.

Hosts and Sponsors

Beckles' lecture and campus visit are part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies' Distinguished Speaker series and ongoing work on Inequalities, Identities, and Justice. The lecture is the closing event in the 60th anniversary Public Issues Forum series of the Einaudi Center's Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.

The event is funded in part by the A.D. White Professor-At-Large Program, the Migrations initiative, and a LACS Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language (UISFL) grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Talk by Trishna Senapaty

This talk explores the conceptual landscape of open prisons in India. Open prisons are institutions intended to facilitate prisoner rehabilitation by permitting them to live in small dwellings with their families and earn livelihoods outside their boundary walls. The talk delves into the tensions between how 'openness' is conceived in prison reform documents and the multiple ways in which it is imagined and materialized through everyday practices. It focuses on a specific open prison in Rajasthan, India, which is considered exceptional even as far as open prisons are concerned, both for its scale and forms of community. It draws attention to its histories and modes of governance that incrementally shape its socio-spatial landscape. This is followed by an interrogation of the elevated status this specific prison enjoys in penal discourse as an idealized community of reformed prisoners while underscoring the open prison's overall potential as a shifting institutional form. By drawing on ethnographic research conducted with activists, advocates, formerly incarcerated persons, and open prison residents, this talk contributes to the study of governance, political and legal institutions, and the carceral state.

Trishna Senapaty is an SSRC IDRF fellow and a PhD candidate in the department of anthropology at Cornell University. Her interests at the intersection of feminist and carceral studies are informed by her experiences working as an educator and volunteer in prisons in India and the US. Her research focuses on prisons and custodial institutions in India, transformative politics and spaces, and anti-carceral socio-legal formations.

Talk by Harshana Rambukwella

This talk explores what solidarity might mean in the current geo-political context through the specific example of postcolonial Sri Lanka, which is experiencing an existential threat unprecedented in the country's contemporary history. Mired in a deep and intractable economic and governance crisis, the country's future looks dark. But despite this despondent outlook, a youth-led protest movement transcends the many institutional, social, and economic fault lines that have characterized Sri Lanka's postcolonial history has emerged. I argue that this movement represents a form of 'deep solidarity' that stands in contrast to other iterations of solidarity, such as enchanted and disenchanted solidarities and vertical and hierarchical solidarities often marred by instrumentalist motives shaped by geo-political power and other forms of instrumental power structures. Exploring the actual protest movement and literary entanglements with the notion of solidarity, I offer a series of critical reflections on the limits and possibilities of solidarity in postcolonial societies. I argue that deep solidarity is a tenuous and, at times, idealistic but, nevertheless, morally and even pragmatically superior alternative to other ways in which solidarity has been imagined.

Harshana Rambukwella is a professor in English at the Postgraduate Institute of English, the Open University of Sri Lanka. Currently, he is a guest professor at the Geography Department at the University of Zurich and shortly before was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen) in Vienna. He was the Sri Lanka Chair at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg in 2019 and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Human Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is the author of The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism (UCL Press 2018) and has published in journals such as boundary 2, the Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Postcolonial Text, among others. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Harshana is active in promoting Anglophone literature as a Trustee of the Gratiaen Prize for English creative writing instituted by Michael Ondaatje and is also a member of the State Literary Panel of Sri Lanka. With a primary focus on postcolonial and comparative literature and theory, Harshana’s work is interdisciplinary in nature and spans fields such as sociolinguistics, nationalism, and history.

This talk from Kyle T. Mays explores the meaning and importance of Indigenous creatives using expressive culture in the fight for Indigenous autonomy and sovereignty. Using contemporary examples of Indigenous Hip Hop, or what he calls "Indigenous Creative Critique," this talk argues for the possibilities created by Indigenous artists in their quest to bring awareness to urban dispossession and erasure within U.S. society.

Kyle T. Mays (he/his) Kyle T. is an Afro-Indigenous scholar of Afro-Indigenous history, urban studies and contemporary popular culture. He is an associate professor in the departments of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at UCLA. He is the author of City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Beacon Press 2021), and Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (SUNY Press, 2018).

This event is part of the Migrations initiative's summer institute, co-sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.