[Sarai Newsletter] FEBRUARY 2007

[The Sarai Programme]

[[CONTENTS]]


[[EVENTS AND WORKSHOPS]]


1. Seminar @ Sarai: Public Spaces and Intellectual Debates in  
Contemporary China, Wan Hui


2. Seminar @ Sarai: The Where of Now - Positionality in the Moment of  
Globalisation, Irit Rogoff


3. Lecture-Demonstration @ Sarai: Cartoons and Icons: Notes from an  
Archive of Blasphemy and Heresy, Shuddhabrata Sengupta


[[FILM]]


4. Film @ Sarai: Rabindranath Tagore, directed by Satyajit Ray,  
introduced by Ramin Jehanbegloo


[[PUBLICATIONS]]


5. Call for Applications: Sarai Reader 07: The Frontier


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[[EVENTS AND WORKSHOPS]]


===============
Seminar @ Sarai
===============


Public Spaces and Intellectual Debates in Contemporary China
A Talk by Wan Hui
  3 P.M., Friday, 9 February 2007
Seminar Room, CSDS


WANG HUI is one of contemporary China’s foremost intellectuals and  
scholars, and has emerged as a critical voice in the tradition of the  
great twentieth-century revolutionary social critic Lu Xun, on whom  
he has written extensively. Professor of History at Qinghua  
[Tsinghua] University in Beijing and the author and editor of many  
books, Wang Hui is also editor of Dushu (Reading), China’s premier  
journal of ideas and critical thought. This journal has a readership  
of something between 100, 000 to
120, 000 and is also read by members of the Chinese Communist Party.


The English-language translation of his book of essays China’s New  
Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition (Harvard, 2003  
and 2006) brought his work to a wider audience, and established his  
reputation outside of China as a significant analyst and critic of  
contemporary capitalism in China. In 2004, Wang Hui’s four-volume  
Zhongguo xiandai sixiangde xingqi (The
Rise of Modern Chinese Thought) was published in Beijing. It is a  
major reinterpretation of the history of Chinese thought from pre- 
imperial times through the present, and has had an enormous influence  
on contemporary discussions of national identity, politics, and the  
nature of state, region, and empire.


Although China’s New Order contains important reflections on the  
Tianammen movement of 1989 and its aftermath, it would be inaccurate  
to describe Wang Hui as a dissident. The current Chinese leadership,  
through a range of social initiatives aimed at China’s growing  
inequality, has registered the force and truth of Wang Hui’s – and  
the New Left’s – critiques, although the regime’s capacity to address  
these problems remains uncertain. Indeed, it is to the character of  
contemporary politics, and of
political possibility in the present, that Wang Hui has devoted  
recent attention.



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'The Where of Now' -  Positionality in the Moment of Globalisation.
A Talk by Irit Rogoff
3:30 P.M, Wednesday, 14 February 2007
Seminar Room, Sarai- CSDS

This talk explores the idea of alternative forms of situatedness in  
contemporary culture, especially contemporary art, at a time when it  
has also become increasingly difficult to define location.

[Irit Rogoff is Professor of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths  
College,London University. She works at the intersections of the  
critical,the political and contemporary artistic practices. Her most  
recent book is "Terra Infirma - Geography's Visual Culture"(Routledge  
2001). She directed "Translating the Image - Cross Cultural  
Contemporary Arts" (AHRC Research Project 2001-2006)from which 2  
volumes will be published by Koenig Verlag in 2007.recent curatorial  
projects include "De-Regulation with thework of Kutlug  
Ataman" (Antwerp, Herzylia,Berlin) and "Academy - Learning from the  
Museum" (Vanabbe Museum, Eindhoven)].


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Cartoons and Icons: Notes from an Archive of Blasphemy and Heresy
A Lecture-Demonstration by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Sarai-CSDS
4:30 P.M., Wednesday, 28 February 2007
Seminar Room, Sarai-CSDS

Cartoons and Icons : Notes from an Archive of Blasphemy and Heresy is  
an exploration of different histories of sanctioned and illicit image  
making in Islamicate societies, with a view to arriving at a more  
nuanced understanding of issues pertaining to image making, freedom  
of expressiona and the xenophobic and  discourse around images, in  
the wake of the publication of the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad  
in European and other newspapers. This presentation, which takes  
place exactly a year after the 'Danish Cartoon' question became an  
international crisis seeks to complicate prevalent narratives of  
blasphemy, heresy and ritualised iconoclasm  in Islamicate societies,  
as well as the ritualised demonization of Muslims in Europe by  
pointing towards recalcitrant histories that defy the imperative of  
narrative simplification.

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta works at the Media Lab at Sarai-CSDS. He is a  
media practitioner, artist and writer with the Raqs Media Collective.]



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[[FILM]]


=====================================
Film @ Sarai: February – March 2007
=====================================


Rabindranath Tagore
Satyajit Ray
1961, India. Documentary, 54 min, B/W
Producer: Films Division, Govt. of India
4:30 P.M., Friday 2 February 2007
Seminar Room, Sarai-CSDS

The film will be introduced by Prof. Ramin Jehanbegloo, Rajni Kothari  
Professor of Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing  
Societies, Delhi


The documentary details the life and work of Rabindranath Tagore  
(1861-1941). The documentary was made to celebrate Tagore’s birth  
centenary in May 1961. Ray was conscious that he was making an  
official portrait of India’s celebrated poet and hence the film does  
not include any controversial aspects of Tagore’s life. However, it  
is far from being a propaganda film. The film comprises dramatized  
episodes from the poet’s life and archived images and documents.


[Ramin Jahanbegloo was born in Tehran and studied at the Sorbonne  
University, Paris. He is currently the Rajni Kothari Professor of  
Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in  
Delhi. Prior to this he was a post-doc at Harvard University and then  
headed the department for contemporary studies at the Cultural  
Research Bureau, Iran. Among his twenty books in English, French and  
Persian are Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (Phoenix, 2000), and (as  
editor) Iran: Between Tradition and Modernity (Lexington Books, 2004).

His intellectual work has featured, among other elements, a close  
engagement with the life and work of Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath  
Tagore.]


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[[PUBLICATIONS]]



Call for Submissions: Sarai Reader 07: The Frontier


Frequently at frontiers we are asked, 'Anything to declare?' The  
wisest thing to do when faced with the scrutiny of a border official
is to say that you have 'Nothing to declare', and quickly move on.  
Crossing borders usually entails an effort not to say too much, or  
at  least to get by with saying very little.  A degree of reticence  
is  the mark of the wise and experienced traveller.

Sarai Reader 07: The Frontier, seeks to turn this ethic of reticence  
on arrival at a boundary, at any boundary, on its head. This time,  
the Reader will consider limits, edges, borders and margins of all  
kind to be sites for declarations, occasions for conversation,  
settings for the staging of arguments, debates, recounting and  
reflection. We invite you to consider the frontier as an open door, a  
chute into something new, or the rediscovery of that which has been  
obscured, a hidden tunnel that crosses under a mountain, a porous  
membrane of liminal possibilities, a zone of contact and contagion.  
We want to think of the frontier as the skin of our time and our  
world, and we invite you to get under the skin of contemporary  
experience in order to generate a series of subcutaneous reflective  
possibilities. For us, the frontier is a threshold waiting to be  
crossed, a space rife with the possibility of seductive transgression.


For the full text of the call, and submission guidelines, please see:  
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2007 January/008578.html



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