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Mobility, Place-Making, and Material Heritage in Indian Ocean Worlds

Through this mini-conference, we will explore new methodologies and theoretical frameworks to understand transregional movements of people and material culture across the Indian Ocean World (IOW) and beyond. As a “process geography,” the IOW has been continuously created by centuries-long cultural exchanges. Our focus is on the means by which process geographies intersect across the ocean, which plays a central role in the histories of both port cities and their hinterlands.

Today, many cities and towns in the IOW littoral are global cities, and their cultural practices divulge clues about how people migrated, adapted, and assimilated. These are cultural “contact zones” (Pratt 1992; Clifford 1997) where different actors and institutions engage in sources of power and knowledge production.

We shall discuss how cross-cultural exchanges are preserved and remembered, updated and reinvented in the IOW through material culture, architecture, performances, rituals, arts, and contemporary place-making practices.

The mini-conference is convened by Neelima Jeychandran, NYUAD Humanities Research Fellow for fall 2015, and moderated by Lauren Minsky, Assistant Professor of History at NYUAD.

Lifestyles under Construction: Religious and Spatial Self-Styling in Bangalore’s Urban Periphery

Smriti Srinivas
My presentation seeks to understand the ethnographic and analytical registers of contemporary urban space in India. Grounded spatially in my long-term research in Bangalore, India’s “Silicon Valley” of nearly nine million people, it discusses what I call the “sacrality of urban sprawl,” i.e., the fact that cities and their expanding boundaries (whether suburban, exurban, or peri-urban) are important arenas for the recruitment of devotees, the construction of habitats to house the religious, new spiritual maps, and ideas of selfhood. An exploration of the strata and groups who inhabit these spaces is not the main focus of this paper. It is clear, however, that most could be seen as constituting the “new middle class” that represents and lays claim to the benefits of liberalization.

I try to show that in addition to consumption patterns and lifestyles, new norms of religious and somatic selfhood are crucial to the production of their identity. Further, while much attention in recent years has been paid to ideologies and displays of religious nationalisms, fundamentalisms, and violence in urban areas, I draw attention in this paper instead to other maps, sensibilities, and architectures of religiosity.

Smriti Srinivas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis and Director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program there. She is also co-director of the Mellon Research Initiative in "Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds." Her research over the last two decades has focused on the relationship between cities, religion, cultural memory, and the body. Her books include In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body City and Memory in a Global Religious Movement (Brill and Orient BlackSwan, 2008), Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s High Tech City (University of Minnesota Press, 2001/Orient BlackSwan, 2004), and The Mouths of People, Voice of God: Buddhists and Muslims in a Frontier Community of Ladakh (Oxford University Press, 1998). She has received numerous grants for her work from institutions such as the Mellon foundation, the Rockefeller foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of California Humanities Network, the American Academy of Religion, the Atlanta History Center, India Foundation for the Arts, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, and Humanistic Institute for Co-operation with Developing Societies.

West Africa and the Indian Ocean Worlds: Some Past and Future Connections from Ghana

De-Valera Nana Yaw Mpere Botchway
In my talk, I bring to the discussion some interesting historical and contemporary cases of West African connections to the Indian Ocean World. Mine is a reminder about an understudied aspect of the ever expanding historical and contemporary African diaspora.

Most studies about Africa and its diaspora in the Indian Ocean world have privileged investigations about the Northern, Central, Southern and Eastern Africa links to the Indian Ocean worlds. I do not have much information about other West African country’s but I use Ghana, where I come from, as an entry to provide few illustrations about some of the interesting historical and contemporary connections that Ghana has with parts of the Indian Ocean worlds.

I highlight some of the national initiatives such as the creation of certain toponyms, establishment of a museum, and local arrangements of diplomatic ties with diaspora communities, to memorialize these nexuses which emerged from slavery, colonial military engagements, and diplomatic arrangements, religious expansionism of some oriental religious constructs into Ghana in the 20th century, and a 21st century effort of the royal house and chief of an indigenous chiefdom in Ghana to maintain a stronger cultural nexus with that chiefdom’s direct relatives in an Indian Ocean community (the Seychelles). These few illustrative cases from Ghana should propel us to strongly insert and reengage the West African connections to the Indian Ocean in our scholarly concerns, interests, dialogues, and investigations.

De-Valera Nana Yaw Mpere Botchway is a Senior Lecturer in the departments of History and African Studies in the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. He has a interdisciplinary research and teaching interests and they include looking at the history of West Africa, African indigenous knowledge systems, regionalism and integration in Africa, Black religious and cultural nationalism(s), and Africans in dispersion. He was a Fellow at the African Studies Centre in the University of Cambridge from 2006- 2007. He also served as a Visiting Scholar and Global Academic Partner in the University of South Florida in 2010, and was an Exchange Faculty in the Grand Valley State University, Michigan in 2012. He was the recipient of the American Council of Learned Society (ACLS) African Humanities Programme Fellowship award for 2013-14 and spent a year in residence at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa. He is a member of the editorial boards of two journals — Drumspeak and Asemka in the Faculty of Arts, University of Cape Coast, Ghana. He is in charge of book reviews for Abibisem, a journal of African Culture and Civilisation, based in the Department of History, University of Cape Coast. He has two books and some scholarly papers in different journals and books.

Swahili Arts Unmoored

Allyson Purpura
This presentation draws on collaborative research underway for an exhibition on the visual arts of the Swahili coast and their reach across the western Indian Ocean world. Enriched by centuries of interconnection and circuits of exchange between Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and Africa, Indian Ocean social formations have long flourished between the borders of continents, empires, and nation states. Viewed as ports of entry into these worlds between borders, Swahili objects resist easy category, transcend origins, confound sequence, and embody at once both social allegiances and disruptions.

Taking cues from the artworks themselves, this presentation explores the extent to which transoceanic spaces and the Swahili coast in particular can be used as critical tools for de-centering imperial, cartographic, and museological frameworks that have long kept “Asia” and “Africa” apart — and in place.

Allyson Purpura is Senior Curator and Curator of the Arts of Africa at Krannert Art Museum (KAM) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Purpura received her PhD in cultural anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research on the social construction of Islamic expertise in Zanzibar led to her current interest in the broader connections between knowledge and power, particularly as they play out in the representational practices of museums. Before coming to KAM, Purpura taught cultural anthropology and critical museology at Haverford College, George Washington University, and the University of Michigan, and was research associate and guest curator at a number of museums, including the National Museum of African Art. She has published on a range of topics including the politics of Islamic charisma in Zanzibar, script and image in African art, “undisciplined” knowledge, ephemeral art, and on the critical “work" of art on display. Select exhibition projects include William Kentridge: Ambivalent Affinities; Allan deSouza: The Farthest Point; Moshekwa Langa: Mogalakwena; Nkata: An Installation by Nnenna Okore, and Encounters, an award-winning reinstallation of KAM’s African art collection. She is working on a collaborative exhibition and book project with art historian Prita Meier.

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From City Streets to Museum Galleries: Discussing Street Art and Graffiti's Leap

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March 1

The Divine Names in Medieval Islamic Thought