Watch video of Ananya Jahanara Kabir , University of Leeds, speaking on history, art, film and modernity in post-colonial South Asia, April 6, 2010.
What is embodied history and what can it tell us that other forms of historical record may not be able to? If an ’embodied’ history is to be contrasted with the ’disembodied’ textual record, where do the historian and literary scholar look for it? Do the technological ramifications of modernity interfere with or enhance the record and transmission of embodied history, for example, through photography, film or musical recording? And what might these questions, when directed to South Asian modernity, reveal to us about that modernity?
This talk offers some tentative answers to these questions and—more importantly perhaps— points to the broader historical and cultural issues that are opened up by an attempted recovery of South Asian embodied histories from the technologies and spaces of their circulation. These arguments form part of an evolving research project on comparing rhythm cultures across Latin American and South Asian postcolonial societies in order to gain new insight into the nature of colonial and postcolonial modernity. This project aims to mobilize embodied histories to cross the Hispanophone-Anglophone linguistic divide, while theorising, in the process, the very idea and practice of ’embodied history’.
Sponsored by Asian Studies Program, Department of History and Department of English.
Contact:Linda Leaming