Writing and the Inscription of Power in South Asia

Saturday, April 6
9:30am-5:30pm
229 Carr Bldg
Duke University

This workshop draws on a range of disciplines (history, anthropology and literature) to explore questions of how writing literally under-wrote projects of cultural dominance and resistance in this key region of the world.  Beyond the activity of mere inscription, our workshop focuses historically on the material and symbolic ways writing served to establish and maintain cultural forms of power.  We also seek to explore questions about how writing was a strategy for redefining and transforming the historical terrain on which people in South Asia constructed and organized their lives. Our various participants bring together a mixture of language varieties (classical and vernacular) in various scripts and genres to demonstrate how writing in different political and social constituencies impacted cultural life in South Asia, especially in regions beyond the Hindi heartland. The workshop thus has the overall goal of advancing a more general and comparative understanding of the relationship between language, culture and power in South Asia.

(Keynote by Nile Green — Friday, April 5)