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The Africa Institute is pleased to invite you to its faculty seminar titled, “The African In Me,” presented by Professor Tejaswini Niranjana, Director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research and Dean, Online Programmes at Ahmedabad University accompanied by Surabhi Sharma, Associate Professor and Program Head of Film and New Media at New York University Abu Dhabi on Monday, May 1, 2023 (03:00 pm GST) at The Africa Institute Library (Click here for location map).
In 2004, cultural theorist Tejaswini Niranjana and film-maker Surabhi Sharma went to Jamaica and Trinidad to make a docu-film on Caribbean music.
The context is one of musical collaborations between Indian rock-pop singer Remo Fernandes and a host of Caribbean musicians, including soca queen Denise Belfon and chutney-soca star Rikki Jai. The film, Jahaji Music: India in the Caribbean (Sharma, 2007) and the book, Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Niranjana, 2006) were two major outcomes of the project. In different ways, the book and the film centred around the question of seeking out what it meant to be ‘Indian’ in the Caribbean. But as popular music showed us, this ‘Indian’ was always one who was disavowing her Indianness, as in the Rikki Jai song ‘Sumintra’ where the protagonist pushes away a suitor bringing her Bollywood music, saying “Doh let me catch you in dat foolishness/ Trying to reach the Indian in me”.
In this presentation, Niranjana and Sharma discuss how Indian modernity as it took shape among the indentured laborers and their descendants in the West Indies was very much in the mode of what writer Kamau Brathwaite called the Afro-Saxon. This means that the Indian in the Caribbean can only be comprehended through the ‘African’ experience in the diaspora. The reason why the formation of elite Indian modernity in the emerging nation-state of India could not accept the ‘Indian’ from the Caribbean diaspora was precisely because that Indian was twinned with the African ex-slave. The main argument of Mobilizing India suggests that the identity of modern-day ‘Indians’ often included that which we had pushed out of the framework of the nation-state. The indentured laborer is one such figure who is part of the constitutive outside of Indian modernity in India, a figure without whom the normative idea of Indian modernity has no substance. Since it is impossible to articulate the Caribbean Indian experience without thinking about the diasporic African experience, we can argue for the shadowy centrality of the ‘African’ in the formation of normative modernity in India.
Niranjana and Sharma feel the need to revisit our Caribbean project in light of the increasingly ferocious calls for ‘purity’ in contemporary India where a re-normativising and re-composing of Indian modernity and a recalling of civilizational essence is currently underway. It is perhaps all the more urgent today to recall the presence of the African in how Indian modernity has historically been put together, whether in India or in the Caribbean. The structure and sequencing of our co-produced film, Jahaji Music is deeply informed by questions about the misrecognition of Indian modernity and by the attempt to glimpse ‘the African in me’.
Professor Tejaswini Niranjana is the Director at the Centre for Inter-Asian Research, and Dean, Online Programmes at Ahmedabad University. Prior to this role, she was Professor and Head, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and Director, Centre for Cultural Research and Development. She is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, which offered an innovative inter-disciplinary Ph.D program from 2000-2012. During 2012-16, she headed the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and was Indian-language advisor to Wikipedia. Professor Niranjana is the author of Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (University of California Press, 1992), Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad(Duke UP, 2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (Duke UP, 2020). Her most recent edited volumes include Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Orient Blackswan, 2015) with Wang Xiaoming; and Music, Modernity and Publicness in India (Oxford University Press, 2020).
For her translations from Kannada into English, she has won the Central Sahitya Akademi Award, the Karnataka State Sahitya Akademi Award, and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. She won the 2021 National Translation Award for Prose for her English translation of the book No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories, an anthology of short stories in Kannada authored by Jayant Kaikini. The award is given by the American Literary Translators Association. She is curator of the Saath-Saath Project, a musical collaboration between Indian and Chinese performers, and producer of three documentary films based on her music research (directed by Surabhi Sharma).
Sharma is a filmmaker based in Abu Dhabi and Mumbai. She has worked on several feature-length documentaries apart from some short fiction films and video installations. Her key concern has been documenting cities in transition through the lens of labor, music and migration, and most recently, reproductive labor. Cinema verite and ethnography are the genres that inform her filmmaking. She is currently teaching in New York University Abu Dhabi and is the Program Head of Film and New Media Program.
Her works include Returning to the First Beat ; Bidesia in Bambai; Can we see the Baby Bump please?; Jahaji Music: India in the Caribbean; Above the Din of Sewing Machines; The Turtle People; and Jari Mari: Of Cloth and Other Stories. Her films have been screened at International Film Festivals like Dubai International Film Festival, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, MAMI Mumbai Film Festival amongst others. Her video installations have been exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery, London; nGbK, Berlin, Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture and the 11th Shanghai Biennale. Her films have been recognized and awarded at the 8th Asia Pacific Screen Awards, Brisbane; The Ramsar-Medwet Award at Eco-Cinema, Greece, Film South Asia, Kathmandu; Karachi Film Festival; and The Festival of Three Continents, Buenos Aires.
The seminar is moderated by Amy Niang is an Associate Professor in Political Science at The Africa Institute.
Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute reaffirms its mission as a center for the study and research of Africa and its diaspora, and its commitment to the training of a new generation of critical thinkers in African and African Diaspora studies.
The seminar will be in English.
The session is free and open to the public. Registration is mandatory, Click here to book your place.
The Africa Institute is pleased to invite you to its faculty seminar titled, “The African In Me,” presented by Professor Tejaswini Niranjana, Director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research and Dean, Online Programmes at Ahmedabad University accompanied by Surabhi Sharma, Associate Professor and Program Head of Film and New Media at New York University Abu Dhabi on Monday, May 1, 2023 (03:00 pm GST) at The Africa Institute Library (Click here for location map).
The Africa Institute is pleased to invite you to its faculty seminar titled, “The African In Me,” presented by Professor Tejaswini Niranjana, Director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research and Dean, Online Programmes at Ahmedabad University accompanied by Surabhi Sharma, Associate Professor and Program Head of Film and New Media at New York University Abu Dhabi on Monday, May 1, 2023 (03:00 pm GST) at The Africa Institute Library (Click here for location map).
In 2004, cultural theorist Tejaswini Niranjana and film-maker Surabhi Sharma went to Jamaica and Trinidad to make a docu-film on Caribbean music.
The context is one of musical collaborations between Indian rock-pop singer Remo Fernandes and a host of Caribbean musicians, including soca queen Denise Belfon and chutney-soca star Rikki Jai. The film, Jahaji Music: India in the Caribbean (Sharma, 2007) and the book, Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Niranjana, 2006) were two major outcomes of the project. In different ways, the book and the film centred around the question of seeking out what it meant to be ‘Indian’ in the Caribbean. But as popular music showed us, this ‘Indian’ was always one who was disavowing her Indianness, as in the Rikki Jai song ‘Sumintra’ where the protagonist pushes away a suitor bringing her Bollywood music, saying “Doh let me catch you in dat foolishness/ Trying to reach the Indian in me”.
In this presentation, Niranjana and Sharma discuss how Indian modernity as it took shape among the indentured laborers and their descendants in the West Indies was very much in the mode of what writer Kamau Brathwaite called the Afro-Saxon. This means that the Indian in the Caribbean can only be comprehended through the ‘African’ experience in the diaspora. The reason why the formation of elite Indian modernity in the emerging nation-state of India could not accept the ‘Indian’ from the Caribbean diaspora was precisely because that Indian was twinned with the African ex-slave. The main argument of Mobilizing India suggests that the identity of modern-day ‘Indians’ often included that which we had pushed out of the framework of the nation-state. The indentured laborer is one such figure who is part of the constitutive outside of Indian modernity in India, a figure without whom the normative idea of Indian modernity has no substance. Since it is impossible to articulate the Caribbean Indian experience without thinking about the diasporic African experience, we can argue for the shadowy centrality of the ‘African’ in the formation of normative modernity in India.
Niranjana and Sharma feel the need to revisit our Caribbean project in light of the increasingly ferocious calls for ‘purity’ in contemporary India where a re-normativising and re-composing of Indian modernity and a recalling of civilizational essence is currently underway. It is perhaps all the more urgent today to recall the presence of the African in how Indian modernity has historically been put together, whether in India or in the Caribbean. The structure and sequencing of our co-produced film, Jahaji Music is deeply informed by questions about the misrecognition of Indian modernity and by the attempt to glimpse ‘the African in me’.
Professor Tejaswini Niranjana is the Director at the Centre for Inter-Asian Research, and Dean, Online Programmes at Ahmedabad University. Prior to this role, she was Professor and Head, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and Director, Centre for Cultural Research and Development. She is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, which offered an innovative inter-disciplinary Ph.D program from 2000-2012. During 2012-16, she headed the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and was Indian-language advisor to Wikipedia. Professor Niranjana is the author of Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (University of California Press, 1992), Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad(Duke UP, 2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (Duke UP, 2020). Her most recent edited volumes include Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Orient Blackswan, 2015) with Wang Xiaoming; and Music, Modernity and Publicness in India (Oxford University Press, 2020).
For her translations from Kannada into English, she has won the Central Sahitya Akademi Award, the Karnataka State Sahitya Akademi Award, and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. She won the 2021 National Translation Award for Prose for her English translation of the book No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories, an anthology of short stories in Kannada authored by Jayant Kaikini. The award is given by the American Literary Translators Association. She is curator of the Saath-Saath Project, a musical collaboration between Indian and Chinese performers, and producer of three documentary films based on her music research (directed by Surabhi Sharma).
Sharma is a filmmaker based in Abu Dhabi and Mumbai. She has worked on several feature-length documentaries apart from some short fiction films and video installations. Her key concern has been documenting cities in transition through the lens of labor, music and migration, and most recently, reproductive labor. Cinema verite and ethnography are the genres that inform her filmmaking. She is currently teaching in New York University Abu Dhabi and is the Program Head of Film and New Media Program.
Her works include Returning to the First Beat ; Bidesia in Bambai; Can we see the Baby Bump please?; Jahaji Music: India in the Caribbean; Above the Din of Sewing Machines; The Turtle People; and Jari Mari: Of Cloth and Other Stories. Her films have been screened at International Film Festivals like Dubai International Film Festival, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, MAMI Mumbai Film Festival amongst others. Her video installations have been exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery, London; nGbK, Berlin, Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture and the 11th Shanghai Biennale. Her films have been recognized and awarded at the 8th Asia Pacific Screen Awards, Brisbane; The Ramsar-Medwet Award at Eco-Cinema, Greece, Film South Asia, Kathmandu; Karachi Film Festival; and The Festival of Three Continents, Buenos Aires.
The seminar is moderated by Amy Niang is an Associate Professor in Political Science at The Africa Institute.
Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute reaffirms its mission as a center for the study and research of Africa and its diaspora, and its commitment to the training of a new generation of critical thinkers in African and African Diaspora studies.
The seminar will be in English.
The session is free and open to the public. Registration is mandatory, Click here to book your place.
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