"The fruits of independence": Satyajit Ray, Indian nationhood and the spectre of empire

Challenging the longstanding consensus that Satyajit Ray's work is largely free of ideological concerns and notable only for its humanistic richness, this article shows with reference to representations of British colonialism and Indian nationhood that Ray's films and stories are marked deeply and consistently by a distinctively Bengali variety of liberalism. Drawn from an ongoing biographical project, it commences with an overview of the nationalist milieu in which Ray grew up and emphasizes the preoccupation with colonialism and nationalism that marked his earliest unfilmed scripts. It then shows with case studies of Kanchanjangha (1962), Charulata (1964), First Class Kamra (First-Class Compartment, 1981), Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), Shatranj ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977), Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991) and Robertsoner Ruby (Robertson's Ruby, 1992) how Ray's mature work continued to combine a strongly anti-colonial viewpoint with a shifting perspective on Indian nationhood and an unequivocal commitment to cultural cosmopolitanism. Analysing how Ray articulated his ideological positions through the quintessentially liberal device of complexly staged debates that were apparently free, but in fact closed by the scenarist/director on ideologically specific notes, this article concludes that Ray's reputation as an all-forgiving, ‘everybody-has-his-reasons’ humanist is based on simplistic or even tendentious readings of his work

Ventriloquizing archives = 檔案庫的腹語術與何子彦對談

From the idea of the Archive and the State to Remembering and Forgetting, and from celluloid image to the architectural object, we define our protagonist: a combination of historian, performer, urban denizen and spy. Urban spaces define our publicness, but they also create covert private knowledges and specialized ways of navigating the city and its archive. This workshop explores what Leo Ou-Fan Lee, describing Shanghai, once named \u27the urban uncanny\u27, and brings together into the city what artist Ho Tzu Nyen has named a dictionary that maps \u27narratives of shape-shifting and amorphous characters, ideas and genres\u27. Such a dictionary defining the covert modern is a crucial project for all forms of engagement with the Asian archives, since the challenge of history-writing in these regions has often involved devising new and innovative ways – of fabrication, of working with fictions, of speculative connections and of overinterpretations – of working with archives that hide, as often and as much as they reveal

‘Follow the Practice’ : Tracing Formations of Culture & Knowledge in Asia : Day 2 : Roundtable

How do cultural practices continue to move in forgotten circuits of conflict and connection, in ways erased by our current maps of meaning? With an interest in investigating and reactivating the deep histories of mobility that underlie our interpretive frames of contemporary Asia, ‘Follow the Practice’ opens a space of inquiry into events and engagements excluded from dominant ideological frames of globalization within and beyond Asia. The workshop proposes the modality of ‘following the practice’, identifying specific negotiations of culture that unsettle the geographies and histories of knowledge fixed by Cold War scholarship. At this interdisciplinary forum, scholars and practitioners present their respective projects towards a collaborative aim of reconfiguring themes of mobilities/migration, globalization, and cultural practice from various ‘Asias’ (South, East, Southeast)

NOISE-SOUND-MUSIC : a research training workshop : day 2

It is not enough to perceive the world as legible or visible. Instead, we need to understand its audibility. We explore how noise is part of modernity, how noise comes to be reconstituted as sound, and how ‘musical noise’ emerges. Attentive to our location in Hong Kong, and to the contemporary emergence of new forms of political subjectivity relating to voicing and being heard, we want to discuss transitions from cognitive listening to feeling-listening; also issues of silence and silencing. We elaborate the meaning of resonance as referring to points of connection and engagement (Hong Kong in the World), and emphasize the importance of “listening to how we listen”. Day 2, at Lingnan University: six discussion sessions led in turn by UCHRI and LU faculty: Ackbar Abbas, David Theo Goldberg, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Anjeline De Dios, and Tejaswini Niranjana