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• 06 jui 2014

  Paris

  Conference, symposium - Asia

  Islam and Regional Cultures in Pakistan

  CEIAS conference

  With the hope of throwing new light on the transformations of Pakistani society, this one-day conference intends to move the focus away from two dominant discourses on Pakistan : that is, on the one hand, the security discourse of political and media circles that reduces Pakistan to a state on the fringe of failure, trying to cope with radical Islam and terrorism; and, on the other hand, Pakistan’s official nationalism, which rests on a unitary conception of the nation that disregards the cultural and religious diversity of the country, stressing instead Islam and Urdu as national unifiers while relegating regional cultures to folklore. This conference hopes to partly fill this gap by inviting participants to illustrate the complex, lived experience of Islam in Pakistan, the identity component of religious practices that do not fit in the dominant norm, and their inscription in local political and ethnic relations. Papers would ideally use first-hand observation and/or analyses of cultural productions to examine circumscribed case studies.

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• 21 mai 2014

  Paris

  Seminar - Asia

  When Books and Art Hurt

  Censorship, Emotions and Cultural Regulation in South Asia

  This workshop aims at exploring issues of literary and artistic censorship in South Asia (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) by focusing on the way anticipated "hurt" often justifies the policing and regulation of the artistic sphere (cinema, visual arts, literature). Our point of departure is, in the words of Arjun Appadurai, the observation that culture is today the field "where fantasies of purity, authenticity, borders and security can be enacted" and that the same censors patrol the boundaries of politics and aesthetics (Coetzee). In the Indian subcontinent "hurt feelings" are often reactivated or cultivated, staged and mass-mediatised to claim recognition and legitimacy in the public sphere, to require compensation or "redressal". Many artists, writers and academics point to a politics of ultra-sensitivity and a thriving "marketplace of outrage". Our objective in this workshop is to question the vocabulary, topicality and tangibility of "hurt" in the public sphere on these issues of artistic regulation in South Asia, and to understand what it means to say that words or images wound.

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