‘Race, Religion, Relatives: Constituting Communities across the Early-Colonial Bay of Bengal – Lecture by Torsten Tschacher (South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg)
Groningen, Tuesday 13 February
Abstract
An important part of colonial knowledge-making was the classification of people into discreet categories: ethnic groups, races, religions. The impact of these classifications on the people of the Indian-Ocean rim was profound, forcing individuals increasingly to identify in terms of the categories supplied by the colonial state. It is far more difficult, however, to connect colonial projects of community definition with precolonial conceptualizations and identifications, including the question of the genesis of colonial-period terminologies beyond either asserting the fundamental difference of precolonial community identifications, or their ‘fluidity’ and non-specificity. At the same time, scholarship has continued to use terms such as ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’ with a certain sense of continuity. How are we to make sense of this problem, and are there ways in which we can connect social histories to those of nomenclature?
Biography
Torsten Tschacher is a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and lecturer for Tamil at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His research focuses on the history and discursive traditions of Tamil-speaking Muslims around the Bay of Bengal. His book Race, Religion, and the ‘Indian Muslim’ Predicament in Singapore was published in 2018 with Routledge. He has also translated two novels from Tamil to German.
‘Only that which has no history is definable’ (Nietszche) – lecture by Mark Philp (Warwick)
Utrecht, Tuesday 26 March
Abstract
In this paper Mark Philp will discuss two strands of research that he has followed for more than 20 years – on democracy and on political corruption – as a way of reflecting on Nietszche’s comment and on its implications for the belief that history retains a relevance to our understanding and analysis of the modern world.
Biography
Mark Philp is a British political philosopher and historian of political thought who specialises in British political thought in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He has published books on Thomas Paine and on responses to the French Revolution in Britain. Philp was a Fellow of Oriel College from 1983 to 2013, and was head of the then newly created University of Oxford Department of Politics and International Relations from 2000 to 2005. He is currently professor of History and Politics at the University of Warwick working on political corruption and the standards of public life, as well as democratic thought in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With Joanna Innes (Oxford), he co-directs the research project ‘Re-imagining Democracy 1750-1850’.
“Subjects & Subjection: Archives & the Soul in the Formation ‘Blackness’ in Early-Modern Spanish America” – lecture by Herman Bennett (City University of New York / Queen Mary, University of London)
Amsterdam, Wednesday 14 May
Abstract
This talk employs the familiar philosophical framing, Subject and Subjection, to query what unintended consequences arose in some of the earliest African-Christian encounters in the New World? “I am overdetermined from without” stated Frantz Fanon who in a decidedly modern context famously took up the existentialist dilemma configured by subject and subjection. But as this talk illustrates, confining subjection to a form of overdetermination risks reducing formations of blackness to a mere negation thereby losing sight of the emergence of early-modern black subjects who experiences arose in but also exceeded the limits of early-modern governance.
Biography
Herman L. Bennett is a Professor at the Graduate Center (CUNY) and Director of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC). Currently he is also Global Professorial Fellows at Queen Mary, University of London. He has held faculty positions at UNC-Chapel Hill, The Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers University, and the Free University of Berlin.
Professor Bennett is a renowned scholar on the history of the African diaspora, with a particular focus on Latin American history. Through his work, he has called for scholars to broaden the critical inquiry of race and ethnicity in the colonial world. He has written extensively on the presence of African slaves and freedmen in Mexican society during the colonial period and on the consequent interaction between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans in colonial Mexico. His publications include: Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (2003); Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (2009); African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty & Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (2019).