A Conversation with Lewis Gordon (at CISA, WITS)

Richa Nagar Speaks in Johannesburg

The Centre for Indian Studies Invites you to a talk

By

Richa Nagar

Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota

Five Truths of Storytelling, Co-authorship and Alliance work.

If all writing is fundamentally tied to the production of meanings and texts through representation and translation, then research that blurs the borders of academia, activism, and creative work is necessarily about the labor and politics of mobilizing experience for particular ends. Co-authoring stories is a chief tool by which those who work in alliances across borders mobilize experience to write against relations of power that produce social violence, and to imagine and enact their visions and ethics of social change. Such work demands a serious engagement with the complexities of identity, representation, and political imagination as well as a rethinking of the assumptions and possibilities associated with engagement and expertise.  In offering five “truths” about co-authoring stories through alliance work, this presentation reflects on the labor process, assumptions, possibilities, and risks associated with co-authorship as a tool for mobilizing intellectual spaces in which stories from multiple locations in an alliance can speak with one another and evolve into more nuanced and effective critical interventions.

The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa invites you to a book launch

New South Asian Feminisms: Paradoxes and Posibilities (Zed Books, 2012)

Edited by Srila Roy

University of Nottingham

  

In conversation with Shireen Hassim, Sharad Chari and Rebecca Walker

South Asian Feminism is in crisis. Once autonomous and radical forms of feminist mobilization have been ideologically fragmented and replaced. This has been the result of constant attack from right-wing nationalism and religious fundamentalism and co-option by 'NGO-ization' and neoliberal state agendas.

"We Will Not Be Moving To Your Transit Camp Today": Development Futures in Democratic South Africa

The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa Invites you to a talk by Dr. Kerry Chance. ACLS New Faculty Fellow, Anthropology Department, Harvard University

"We Will Not Be Moving To Your Transit Camp Today": Development Futures in Democratic South Africa

This talk examines shifting political meanings of housing evictions in democratic South Africa.  Since the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, townships and shack settlements – commemorated in liberation histories as heroic battlegrounds and shameful testaments to apartheid – have been recast in public discourse as ‘slums,’ zones of de facto criminality, earmarked for clearance or development.  In recent years, residents have been moved en masse away from public spaces to ‘transit camps,’ the latest technology of slum elimination that is reshaping the urban periphery. Street protests against these evictions have been officially condemned and met with brutality by police and private security forces. While state agents justify evictions under a liberal logic of progressively realized rights and inclusive citizenship, residents see continuities with apartheid-era removals and new forms of exclusion at the intersections of race and class. I argue, by studying these interactions between residents and state agents, governmental modes of managing slum populations and relations of force become visible, and with them, emerging political practices of a collectively self-identified ‘poor.’

Decolonising Thought - Walter D Mignolo (Centre for Indian Studies in Africa & Wiser @ Wits)

Two Days With the Spirit of C.L.R. James

The Humanities Graduate Centre Key Thinkers Series, in conjunction with
the Reading Group for African Critical Thought (RGFACT) and the Centre
for Indian Studies in Africa  (CISA) Presents:

TWO DAYS WITH THE SPIRIT OF C.L.R. JAMES

C.L.R James (1901-1989), originally from Trinidad, was among the most
original, wide-ranging and influential postcolonial thinkers and
activists of the 20th Century.  His work as a political theorist (e.g.
Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx and Lenin), historian (The Black
Jacobins), literary critic (Mariners, Renegades and Castaways), cricket
journalist (Beyond a Boundary) and writer of fiction (Minty Alley) is
too little known in South Africa.