Monday, April 7
9:30 am – 5:30 pm ET
Alumni Center, 716 Columbus Ave.
Boston, MA 02120
Register Here!
This symposium gathers scholars of Global South Asia to critically examine obliterative and traumatic violence within the region’s border zones, including Kashmir, Punjab, and Bangladesh. These contested spaces remain fraught with histories of partition, displacement, settler colonialism, and structural violence, shaping contemporary struggles over religion, caste, language, gender, sexuality, and the politics of cohabitation and accommodation. By centering the experiences of those who navigate these contested geographies, we aim to unsettle dominant discourses of empire, land dispossession, and historical erasure while situating these discussions within broader frameworks of migration, security, and transnational mobility.
At the heart of our conversation is the publication of Dr. Sahana Ghosh’s exciting new book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (University of California Press, 2023). Ghosh’s work raises critical questions: How do those living in borderlands experience and analyze the shifting dynamics of territorial demarcation? How do they make sense of and negotiate state violence, bureaucratic entanglements, and everyday surveillance? She argues that to narrate how people navigate and live with the violence and injustices of bordering is to reach beyond a victimhood/resistance binary. Her work compels us to think beyond conventional frameworks of state and subjectivity to consider how transnational migration both destabilizes and reconfigures the meanings of belonging, citizenship, and sovereignty. Attention to transnational migration, through a feminist perspective, opens up understandings of settler colonialism, complicity, and critical diaspora studies.
We have an exciting line up of participants! Including: Sahana Ghosh (National University of Singapore); Hafsa Kanjwal (Lafayette College); Harleen Kaur (Arizona State University); Mubbashir Rizvi (American University); Natasha Raheja (Cornell University); Shenila Khoja-Moolji (Georgetown University); and Stan Thangaraj (Stonehill College). Closing remarks will be made by Northeastern’s own Kris Manjapra.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/border-zones-of-global-south-asia-symposium-tickets-1144676571439
