Wednesday, May 05, 2010

stanford: Tomorrow (05/05): "Naming the Muslim: Cinema and Its Religions," Cubberley Auditorium, Stanford University, 7:00 pm

may 5th, 2010

guess who's funding this, and guess what the conclusion drawn will be.

although the actual answer is: mohammedans have to assert that they are not terrorists because the vast majority of terrorists in the world are in fact religious mohammedans. it's like the yanks and their drug-control program -- instead of catching the junkies in the US and detoxing them (demand-control) they go and burn some grass and poppy plantations somewhere else (supply-control). this is clearly a losing strategy. similarly, instead of reining in their blood-thirsty terrorists, the mohammedans want the rest of us to pretend that all mohammedans are holy-holy. again a losing strategy, in the face of considerable evidence of the correlation between mohammedanism and terrorism.

as for this talk, i don't know the other characters, but i listened to a podcast by this aishwary fellow and he came across as one of those po-co-po-co-po-mo deconstructionist types. about 15 mins into the 1.5 hour podcast, i gave up. either the fellow was babbling utter bilge, or he is a completely deracinated ex-indian of the wendy-doniger-rah-rah-club (he studied in britain i think, so he might be a william-dalrymple-rah-rah type), or what he was saying was so exalted that it just went way over my head.

i'd bet on hypotheses 1 or 2. i mean, just read the titles of his books. clearly these tomes can be written by the dada engine (google for it).

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sarah Lin Bhatia <slbhatia@stanford.edu>
Date: 2010/5/4
Subject: Tomorrow (05/05): "Naming the Muslim: Cinema and Its Religions," Cubberley Auditorium, Stanford University, 7:00 pm
To: southasia@lists.stanford.edu


THE ABBASI PROGRAM IN ISLAMIC STUDIES at STANFORD UNIVERSITY
presents:

"NAMING THE MUSLIM: CINEMA AND ITS RELIGIONS"

PRIYA JAIKUMAR (School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern
California) AISHWARY KUMAR (Department of History, Stanford University)
SABA MAHMOOD (Department of Anthropology, University of California-
Berkeley)

The central character in the recent film My Name is Khan is compelled to
state again and again, "My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist." In
this discussion, we reflect on the worldwide success of this film to ask
questions about the relationship between cinematic cultures and
religious actions and identity. How do this film's voices relate to
concerns of personal expression, secularism, and political violence? How
does the film engage the politics of religion and race? What is to be
made of this film's origins in India and its portrayal of American
physical, social, and religious landscapes, especially in the context of
global empire, past and contemporary.

Wednesday, May 5th 2010, 7:00 pm
Cubberley Auditorium, Stanford University
485 Lasuen Mall, Stanford University, Stanford
Parking is free after 4 pm.
The closest parking is located in the Oval and on Serra and Galvez Street.

THE EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO PUBLIC.

For more information, please contact the Abbasi Program Office at
abbasiprogram@stanford.edu or visit http://islamicstudies.stanford.edu

Priya Jaikumar is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
in School of Cinematic Arts at University of Southern California. Her
research has focused on the problem of interpreting historical change in
cultural industries and aesthetic forms, in particular the break from
colonial relations dominating the nexus of Britain, India and the
dominions. Her book Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of
Transition in Britain and India (Duke University Press, 2006) challenges
the rubric of national cinema dominant in film studies, to detail the
intertwined film histories of a declining empire and a nascent nation.
Her work has also appeared in Cinema Journal, The Moving Image, Post
Script, Screen, World Literature Today, and in recent anthologies
such as Hollywood Abroad and Transnational Feminist Encounters In Film
and Media. Currently, she is working on architecture, photography and
cinema in the colonial context.

Aishwary Kumar is Assistant Professor of Modern History in Department of
History at Stanford University. His work is fundamentally concerned with
the pasts and futures of universal history, as it has come to be
mediated by the particularities of the postcolonial predicament. His
research interests focus on the global life of democracy and political
religion; the status of civility and sacrifice in modern thought; the
future of the archive; and the corpus of Indian composer RD Burman. His
work has appeared in The Liberal and Cambridge Anthropology, and is
forthcoming in Modern Intellectual History and Public Culture. He is
currently working on two books, provisionally titled Futures of
Indigenous Past: Coloniality, and The Anti-Archive and Touchabilities:
Fraternity, Freedom and Measures of the Political.

Saba Mahmood is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology in
Department of Anthropology at University of California-Berkeley. Her
research interests include the articulations of secular modernity in
postcolonial societies, with particular attention to issues of subject
formation, religiosity, embodiment, and gender in the Middle East and
South Asia. Her book The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the
Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005) won in 2005 the
American Political Science Association's Victoria Schuck Award and the
Middle East Studies Association's Albert Hourani Book Award. Her work
has appeared in Public Culture, Social Research, Anthropological
Quarterly, and Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and
Cultural Studies.

For more information about the film My Name is Khan , please see: http://www.mynameiskhanthefilm.com.


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1 comment:

Sactown Bobby said...

what r the two hindu sounding names doing on the panel? Hindus have to be there on worst enemies. A pathetic movie is used to higlight imagined persecution of Muslims. "Worldwide" sucess is probably limited to the Muslims Worldwide.