South-South Workshop: Intellectual History Across Middle East & South Asia (1857-1948)

Sponsored by the Center for International History at Columbia

Thursday October 20

4:30 pm - 8:00 pm

411 Fayerweather 

Columbia University

Friday, October 21

8:30 am - 8:00 pm

501 Northwest Corner Building

Columbia University

Featuring Key Note Speakers: Kavita Datla (Associate Professor of History, Mt. Holoyoke; Umar Ryad (Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, Universiteit Utrecht)

The workshop aims to raise a set of interdisciplinary historical, historiographical and theoretical questions: What kinds of significant geographies are produced, traversed and imagined in the nineteenth century and after between the Middle East and South Asia? Does the presence of a shared Islamicate past adequately explain Indian and Arab Muslim affiliations? How are the Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian and Hindu intellectual communities part of this Islamicate? How is modernist thought or critiques of secularism or theories of anti-colonialism related in this unwritten history of Asian intellectual interaction? What role did political economy of colonialism play in restructuring the conditions of the early modern's "connected histories"? What new networks of intellectual exchange and new patterns of racialization emerged? How do we historically recuperate these South-South histories without succumbing to the follies of the post-colonial states?

For more information and a complete schedule of topics and speakers, please click here. The workshop is open to the public.

If you plan to attend, please email southsouthworkshop@gmail.com to receive the papers before the workshop.