Why do we see the country and the city as intrinsically different spaces and ways of being? Almost 50 years after Raymond Williams (1973) argued that this contrast is “one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society,” we continue to see agrarian economies and life as relics of an idyllic past, dissolving at the hands of the forward-marching cities. Against perspectives that saw the development of capitalism as an urban/industrial set of forces slowly gnawing away at rural/agrarian harmonious and simple living, Williams saw industrial capitalism as intrinsically connected to feudalism and agrarian capitalism, the urban to the rural. Rather than reflecting a historical reality, he argued that this spatial and ideological binary was constructed in direct response to the growth of capitalism and imperialism.

Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas—but agrarian livelihoods and lives are not merely withering away. The country-versus-city binary continues to govern our efforts to find solutions to the grave crises of our times. Contemporary solutions, such as agroecology as an antidote to industrial agriculture or green energy as a foil to fossil fuels, invoke the return to a pristine, sustainable past.

This conference will showcase graduate student papers that explore how the country and city constitute each other and investigate how capital, labor, imaginaries, and sentiments flow between the two.

10-11:30 am - Constructing Nature

Presentations by: Michael Cary, Jessie Mayall, Suraj Kushwaha and Finn Domingo

Discussant: Nataya Friedan

Constructions of nature, Williams reminds us, often contain veiled arguments about people, societies and social relations. This panel asks what kinds of social arguments are embedded in ideas of environmental instability and what kinds of politics emerge from them. We begin in England, where romanticized understandings of ‘the countryside’ underlie contemporary visions for landscape ‘optimization’ for food production and carbon sequestration. We then move to the remote Siachen glacier, where representations of the world’s highest battlefield by the Indian Army mediate public consent for militarization through appeals to martyrdom and national pride. From there we move to the aftermath of wildfires in Los Angeles, where the financial mechanisms and socio-economic effects of homeowners insurance are exacerbating an already unaffordable housing market. Finally, we turn to Paraguay, where the infrastructures of defense from destructive floods—and the politics of blame for when they happen—shape the relationship between an expanding city and neglected countryside.

12:30 -2pm - Morality of Improvement

Presentations by: Yui Sasajima, Maria Paula Espejo and Allen Huang

Discussant: Paul Kohlbry

These four papers examine the construction of rural spaces and urban fringes, paying attention to the flexible ideas of home that often lie behind the creation of certain spaces as desirable or ideal. At the heart of this question is the issue of improvement, which Raymond Williams points us to as a driver behind the subjection of tenants and the landless.Drawing on varying methodologies, these papers examine how rural and urban spaces are bridged—or thought to be bridged—through social reproduction, how home is made in new spaces, and who benefits from the drive to “improve.”

2:15-3:45pm - Structures of Feeling

Presentations by: Liam Greenwell, Georgia Koumantaros , Andrew Colpitts and Grace Myers

Discussant: Katharine Lindquist

Raymond Williams invites us to investigate the dialogic relationship between the rural and urban through the unspoken, shared, and historically contingent “structures of feeling” that emerge from cultural texts. This panel examines Williams’s contribution in relation to the moral, symbolic, representational, and material assemblages by which the rural is imagined. In doing so, we ask how the country and the city become sites of imagined dystopia and utopia alike by which people reimagine life in generative ways. These papers track imagined promises of the countryside—from a site for family values, national becoming, future imagination, and self-actualization—in contexts from rural evangelicalism in New York, queer reckonings with both limitation and thriving, folklore and placemaking in coal country, and the contradictions of village life in Greece. The unclear lines between utopia and dystopia trouble the position of the figures involved and promise—or threaten?—collective self-fashioning.

Keynote address of the 27th SEAP Graduate Student Conference.

This talk, drawing upon years of fieldwork in Malaysia and South India has two main aims: First, in questioning the mobility and translatability of biomedical interventions given cultural conceptions of self, spirit, and wellness, I ask to what extent cultural difference really matters, as some have argued for South and Southeast Asia? Second, I query the extent to which mobility, modernity, and madness are inextricably linked, problematizing the very construction of inside and outside forces as sometimes naturalized by anthropologists, healers, and clinicians when writing on mental health, particularly when concerning spirit possession, that most “traditional” of afflictions. This binary, in turn, has effaced the complex entanglements of difference and difference-making, the heterodox and power-laden values that posit binaries by those powerful and vulnerable alike, albeit with different stakes. I argue that mobility and immobility within symbolic and semantic registers also matters, along with geographic and social mobility.

Andrew C. Willford is a professor of anthropology and Asian studies at Cornell University. His latest book, The Future of Bangalore’s Cosmopolitan Pasts: Civility and Difference in a Global City (University of Hawaii, 2018) examines the politics of language, religion, identity, and belonging in Bangalore, India. His previous research focused on forms of Tamil and Hindu displacement, revivalism, and identity politics in Malaysia.

COMMColloquium

Identity at the Limits of Representation

Aswin Punathambekar, Distinguished Lecturer, Professor, University of Pennsylvania

3 pm in 102 Mann

Reception to follow in the Hub

Given the continual and savvy recognition by the state and the media industries of various kinds of social and cultural difference, how should we approach breakthroughs in media representation? If racism in Western, multi-ethnic societies operates in the context of increased, not less, visibility, how do we make representation matter anew? I approach these questions by focusing attention on how Muslimness in Western television entertainment is being reimagined in the context of new industrial logics and techno-cultural possibilities enabled by streaming video services and social media platforms. Taking stock of shows including Ms Marvel (Disney+), Ramy (Hulu), Man Like Mobeen (BBC/Netflix), and We Are Lady Parts (Channel 4/Peacock), this talk will develop an account of diasporic worldmaking that captures marginalized communities’ deeply felt desires for being seen and heard, the representational moves that media workers are crafting, and the translocal networks that diasporic media professionals are forging in order to imagine and produce new cultural worlds.

Aswin Punathambekar is a Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, and Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC). His work explores media and cultural change in postcolonial and diasporic contexts, with a focus on media industries and institutions, formations of audiences and publics, and cultural identity and politics. He takes cultural and historical approaches to studying global media and communication with focus on South Asia, the U.S., and the U.K. He has authored and edited several books including A Mobile Popular: Media, Culture, and Politics in Digital India (forthcoming, NYU Press) and Planet Digital (co-edited with Adrienne Shaw and Jonathan Gray, forthcoming from NYU Press), and Media Industry Studies (Polity). He is now shifting attention to a new book project, provisionally titled Television and British Asian Culture: From Broadcasting to Streaming Media.

arch 3

CRICKET AND THE IDEA OF INDIA

‘Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English’, it has famously been said. Today, the Indian cricket team is a powerful national symbol, a unifying force in a country riven by conflicts. But India was represented by a cricket team long before it became an independent nation.

My lecture tells the extraordinary story of how the ‘idea of India’ emerged on the cricket field in the high noon of empire. Conceived by an unlikely coalition of colonial and local elites, it took twelve years and three failed attempts before a representative Indian cricket team made its debut on the playing fields of imperial Britain in 1911.

This historic tour, which took place against the backdrop of revolutionary protest in the Edwardian era, featured an improbable cast of characters. The team’s young captain was Maharaja Bhupinder Singh, the embattled ruler of Patiala. The other cricketers were chosen on the basis of their religious identity. Remarkably, for the day, two of the players belonged to a community denigrated as ‘Untouchable’.

Over the course of a blazing Coronation summer, these long-forgotten Indian heroes participated in a collective enterprise that epitomizes how sport— and above all cricket—helped fashion the imagined communities of both empire and nation.