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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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