South Asia seminar series - Sarah Saddler: "Think Differently: Get Creative:" Producing Precarity within India's Corporate Theatre Culture Industry

"Think Differently: Get Creative:" Producing Precarity within India's Corporate Theatre Culture Industry

Sarah Saddler

Department of Theater, Arts and Dance

Date:  March 24, Thursday
Time:  4-5:30 PM
Place:  609 Social Sciences

Sarah Saddler, PhD candidate at the Department of Theater, Arts and Dance, will give a presentation on her doctoral work. Sarah is going to Yale to present a conference paper on this topic and she would benefit from this group's feedback.

Abstract:

In India’s rapidly developing global cities, transnational corporations implement theatre-based corporate training programs that are designed to inspire employees to be more dynamic, aspirational, and self-motivated at work. Offering a performance ethnography perspective of a week-long Theatre in Excellence program hosted in Bangalore (2014), I suggest that the theatre-based corporate training process is a site where the emergent Indian neoliberal laboring subject is being talked about, experimented with, and actively shaped. In India, a previously colonized, emerging global superpower undergoing neoliberal restructuring, practices of theatre-based corporate training illuminates how performance both interrogates and and reproduces employee precarity within neoliberal capitalism.

Bio:

Sarah Saddler is a PhD student in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota. Her research, which is based on experiences facilitating and observing theatre-based training programs throughout India since 2012, has been presented at the International Federation for Theatre Research (2014) and the Mid-America Theatre Conference (2014, 2015, 2016).

South Asia Scholarly Events calendar 

ICGC Brown Bag March 11: Lalit Batra

Gases, Cockroaches, and Bare Bodies:

Dalits and the Politics of Sanitation

in Postcolonial Delhi

Lalit Batra, Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow from the Department of Geography, Environment and Society

Date: Fri, 03/11/2016
Time:  12:00-1:00pm

Place: 537 Heller Hall

Series:  ICGC Brown Bag (open to all and you can bring your lunch and eat)

Abstract: The universalization of modern sewerage system, consisting of technologies such as ‘flush-and-forget’ toilets, piped gravity-fed drainage, enclosed sewers, sewage pumping stations and biological treatment plants, has been a key component of urban infrastructure planning and public health policy in post-Independence India. Faced with the ethical and political challenge posed by the political articulation of manual scavenging as the paradigmatic case of caste-based exploitation, the postcolonial Indian state has promoted this particular configuration of wastewater technologies as a form of infrastructural intervention that would liberate dalits (formerly untouchable castes who dealt with the manual handling of human excreta) from the indignity and occupational hazards of manual scavenging. However, the modernization of sanitation infrastructure has produced a perverse outcome: far from liberating dalits, it has exacerbated their physical vulnerability and social marginalization by predominantly employing them as sewage workers in city municipalities. Traditional manual scavenging has arguably declined; however, manual handling of excreta-filled sewage has proliferated - only this time in the form of a far more dangerous work process, involving manual cleaning of deadly gas producing enclosed sewers. Drawing on my ongoing dissertation research into the relationship between sewerage system and sanitation workers in Delhi, I discuss how and with what consequences the connection between dalits and sanitation is reproduced in postcolonial Delhi.


South Asia Scholarly Events calendar 

Selected new titles in Ames Library - March 2016

Click here to download a copy

SELECTED NEW TITLES IN AMES LIBRARY

MARCH 2016

Listing books added in February

Epigraphy and Islamic culture: inscriptions of the early Muslim rulers of Bengal (1205-1494).  Siddiq, Mohammad Yusuf, (London; Routledge, 2016)

Ames Library CN1173.B4 S52 2016

Afghan history through Afghan eyes.  Green, Nile, (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2015)

Ames Library DA355.2.A37 2015

Pakistan's political labyrinths: military, society and terror.  Kalia, Ravi, (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016)

Ames Library DS383.5.A2 P35 2016

Air Marshal (Retd) Muhammad Asghar Khan, the Tehrik-i-Istiqlal and the politics of opposition in Pakistan, 1971-77.  Malik, Nadeem Shafiq, (Lahore: Fiction House, 2015)

Ames Library DS384.M2725 2015

Couldn't have been better: my life story.  Husain, Syed Mustafa Anwer, (Karachi: Paramount Books, 2015)

Ames Library DS389.22.H87 H87 2015

Gandhi and Tagore: politics, truth and conscience.  Mukherji, Gangeya, (Abingdon, Oxon; Routledge, 2016)

Ames Library DS423.M85 2016

Indian Muslims and Citizenship: Spaces for jihad in everyday life.  Abdelhalim, Julten, (London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2016)

Ames Library DS432.M84 A2366 2016

My Myanmar years: a diplomat's account of India's relations with the region.  Malik, Preet, (New Delhi; SAGE Publications, 2016)

Ames Library DS450.B93 M35 2016

The last Hindu emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian past, 1200-2000.  Talbot, Cynthia, (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Ames Library DS460.P77 T35 2016

The Bose brothers and Indian Independence: an insider's account.  Bose, Madhuri, (New Delhi, India; SAGE Publications, 2016)

Ames Library DS481.A1 B67 2016

Jammu and Kashmir: politics of identity and separatism.  Chowdhary, Rekha, (Abingdon, Oxon; Routledge, 2016)

Ames Library DS485.K27 C46 2016

The cultural legacy of Lucknow.  Sharma, Sharmishtha, (Kanpur Jagran Prakashan Limited, 2013)

Ames Library Quarto DS486.L9 S5155 2013

Deliberating environment policy in India: participation and the role of advocacy.  Ganguly, Sunayana, (Abingdon, Oxon; Routledge, 2016)

Ames Library HC440.E5 G37 2016

BITS of belonging: information technology, water and neoliberal governance in India.  Dasgupta, Simanti, (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, 2015)

Ames Library HD9696.63.I43 B364 2015

The Millennium Development Goals, Bangladesh progress report.  ([Dhaka, Bangladesh]: General Economics Division Planning Commission Government of the People's Republic of Bangladesh Began with 2005?)

Ames Library Quarto HN690.6.A494  2012-2013

Voices from the edge: justice, agency and the plight of floating sex workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh.  Haque, Reazul. (Münster: Lit Verlag c2015.)

Ames Library HQ240.6.D47 H37 2015

The problem of caste.  Deshpande, Satish, (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014)

Ames Library HT720.P75 2014

Criminal capital: violence, corruption and class in industrial India.  Sanchez, Andrew (New Delhi; Routledge, 2016)

Ames Library HV6025.S327 2016

ELCOP yearbook of human rights.  (Dhaka: Empowerment Through Law of the Common People 200u)

Ames Library K5.L33  2013

Maya Burman: January 2014.  Burman, Maya, (New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2014)

Ames Library ND553.B986 A4 2014

When jewellery speaks: celebrating the tradition of Kundan Minakaari.  Vyas, Shimul Mehta, (Jaipur: DiamondWorld; 2012)

Ames Library Folio NK7376.A3 R358 2012

Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, brotherhood, and the nation.  Elison, William, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016)

Ames Library PN1997.A3415 E55 2016

Haider: the original screenplay (with English translation).  Bharadwaj, Vishal, (New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014)

Ames Library PR9499.4.B43 H35 2014

 

South Asia Seminar Series Friday, March 4

Documentary Screening
with filmmaker Meghnath Bhattacharjee.

Date: Friday, March 4

Time: 3-5 PM

Place: 710 Social Sciences

Background:

 Maghnath has been documenting the cultural and political events within tribal communities in central India. Dance and music performances by tribal minorities in India, in association with their social and political movements are central to the filmography of Meghnath.

Meghnath is coming to here to interview people who worked with Dr. Ram Dayal Munda when he taught  in the Dept. of South Asian Studies.  R. D. Munda became an important and charismatic leader in  the cultural arts and  politics of tribal minorities in central India when he gave up his tenured post at U of MN to head a Dept. of Tribal and Regional Languages in the Bihar state University system (at Ranchi).

• A remembrance of Ram Dayal Munda is here

• A list of works written or translated by Munda is here

South Asia Scholarly Events calendar