Global Modernism Lecture Series
Tuesday, March 1, 2022 – Thursday, March 17, 2022Global Modernisms
Global Modernisms is a collaboration among OSUN institutions that focuses on modernism’s transnational exchange, aiming to open up the modernist canon and integrate approaches to teaching and research on modernism. The Project is led by BCB Faculty Prof. Dr. Laura Scuriatti and Prof. Dr. James Harker, with colleagues from the American University in Beirut, Bard College in Annandale, and the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá.
Daphné Budasz and Markus Wurzer: Public Spaces and the Material Presence of Empire's Memory in Italy
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
9:10 pm – 11:00 pm CEST
Although Italy's colonial empire had been small and short-lived, today numerous material traces - street names, monuments, buildings etc. - can be found in Italian public spaces. By marking physical locations on a digital map, the project Postcolonial Italy aims at making historical knowledge available to a large audience to stimulate a public debate on Italy's silenced colonial past. Material traces are not only geographically captured, but also - and this is crucial - historically contextualized. The map intends to recall the manifold connections between Italian public spaces and the colonial and fascist past, which often remains absent from collective memory.
This event is offered by Bard College, Annandale, as part of the Modernism and Fascism: Cultural Heritage and Memory course in cooperation with Bard College Berlin through Global Modernisms, an OSUN Network Collaborative Course.
Daphné Budasz is a PhD researcher at the department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. She studied history at Lausanne University and at Queen Mary University of London. She also completed a professional master degree in public history at Université Paris-Est Créteil. Daphné has worked for the French magazine L’Histoire and as an assistant curator for the House of European History in Brussels.
Her current PhD research deals with the history of race, cross-cultural intimacy and Indian migration in British East Africa (1895-1923). Besides her research, she is involved in several public history projects. She is notably one of the founders of the French public history organisation La Boîte à Histoire.
Markus Wurzer is historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle an der Saale. He studied history and German language and literature at the Universities of Graz and Bologna. He was a research assistant and lecturer at the Department of History at the University in Graz as well as a university assistant at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at the University in Linz. His research has taken him to the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome, the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Harvard University in Cambridge/MA and the European Academy (EURAC) in Bolzano/Bozen. He is co-coordinator of www.postcolonialitaly.com and member of the Steering Committee of “Evidence and Imagination – Special Editions”. Wurzer has received numerous prizes for his work, including the 2016 award of the Dr. Alois Mock Europa-Stiftung for his MA thesis and the 2019 award of the Theodor Körner Fonds for his dissertation. In his PhD thesis he focused on Italy’s colonial enterprise against Ethiopia (1935-1941) in visual culture and family memories. Drawing on the photographs of Italy’s German-speaking soldiers from the province of Bolzano/Bozen as a case study, the thesis explored private photographic practices, the construction and diffusion of colonial (and fascist) visual culture, and followed its persisting traces in family memory until the present day.
Dr. Suraj Yengde: Caste: Suture of Oriental and Occidental Mesh
Thursday, March 10, 2022
3:45 pm – 5:15 pm CEST
Dr. Suraj Yengde is one of India’s leading scholars and public intellectuals. Named as one of the "25 Most Influential Young Indian" by GQ magazine and the "Most influential Young Dalit" by Zee, Suraj is an author of the bestseller Caste Matters and co-editor of award winning anthology The Radical in Ambedkar. Caste Matters was recently featured in the prestigious "Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade" list by The Hindu. Caste Matters is being translated in seven languages.
Suraj holds a research associate position with the department of African and African American Studies. Suraj's recent appointment was Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and was part of the founding team of Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability (IARA) at Harvard University. He has studied in four continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, North America), and is India’s first Dalit Ph.D. holder from an African university (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg). He is an International Human Rights attorney by qualification from India and the UK.
Suraj has published over 100 essays, articles, and book reviews in multiple languages in the field of caste, race, ethnicity studies, and labor, migration in the global south. Currently, he is involved in developing a critical theory of Dalit and Black Studies. He has been nominated for India's highest literary award "Sahitya Akademi" and is a recipient of the "Dr. Ambedkar Social Justice Award" (Canada, 2019) and the "Rohit Vemula Memorial Scholar Award" (2018).
Suraj has worked with leading international organizations in Geneva, London, and New York. He is a co-convener of Dalit-Black Lives Matter symposium and the Dalit and Black Power Movement. He runs a monthly Ambedkar Lecture Series at Harvard. He is an associate editor of Southern Journal of Contemporary History.
His talk will discuss Dalit public and print sphere of the 19th – 20th century, the formation of Dalit consciousness and anti-Brahminism, the census and the role of the British in mismanaging this very important phase, and a critical take on postcolonial and subaltern scholarship.
Dr. Munia Bhaumik: Translating Tagore in Latin America
Thursday, March 17, 2022
4:00 pm – 5:15 pm CEST
During the first half of the twentieth century, an epochal period defined by two world wars, fascism, and the British empire’s disintegration, a set of intertextual lyric routes circulate between Bengali, Spanish, and Portuguese-language poets (although none of them could read the other’s poetry in the original language). These “lyric routes” between the peripheral but high modernist metropoles of Buenos Aires, Calcutta, Havana, Mexico City, and Santiago are pivotal in reshaping key aesthetic debates and poetic experiments reflexively cognizant of the limits of European discourses of Westphalia and “civilization.” Moreover, the often playful translations of verse from a previous translation, rather than the language of the original text, render new poetic forms and philosophies of language for critical concern.
This lecture focuses on the specter of Rabindranath Tagore’s verse and celebrity in Latin America during a pivotal moment of world decolonization during the interwar period. As intellectual, art, and literary historians demonstrate, not just Tagore’s Nobel Prize recognized oeuvre and prose-poem Gitanjali, but a number of earlier writings, dramatic plays, doodles, and paintings come to yield enormous influence on major Latin American poets, philosophers, and intellectuals. Yet the translations and incorporations of Tagore’s poetic-philosophy by Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Jose Lezama Lima, Victoria Ocampo, and (eventually) Octavio Paz are not mere passive translations but offer a critical reservoir of lyric transculturation registering a specifically modernist disenchantment with European modernity. At stake in this comparative framing is not just a story of reception between South Asia and Latin America, but critical reconfigurations of the political ideals of universality as world-making through poesis.
Munia Bhaumik is the Program Director of Mellon Social Justice Curricular Initiatives at the University of California, Los Angeles and an award-winning scholar of comparative literature, politics, and law. Her research and teaching critiques racial and gender inequities as well as the multiple social factors impacting whose lives count before the law. Dr. Bhaumik received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley before joining the faculty at Emory University in Atlanta where she engaged with new Asian/Latinx immigrant and African American community voting rights alliances in the South, while also developing a vibrant undergraduate degree program in comparative literature and critical theory. Based on her research about noncitizens as the “uncounted,” data and democracy, as well as on poetry as political action across the Global South, she received the prestigious Stanford Humanities Center, Herman Melville Society, and Cornell Society for the Humanities faculty awards. Prior to entering academia, Dr. Bhaumik also spent a decade as a primarily Spanish-speaking labor/community organizer on the staff of leading progressive organizations in Los Angeles shaping national debates about social justice through direct action. Equally motivated by the humanities as by social movements, particularly the ethical dilemmas communities-of-color are mobilizing in this global (post)metropolis, her work brings to attention research protocols in alliance with the demands for abolition and noncitizen citizenship as well as multilingual, queer, migrant, worker, healthcare, and Black equal rights.
This is the third lecture in the Global Modernisms lecture series. Global Modernisms is a collaboration among OSUN institutions that focuses on modernism’s transnational exchange, aiming to open up the modernist canon and integrate approaches to teaching and research on modernism.