China and India: Globalization with Different Paths

This occasional paper has three essays written by professors from Pace University and Nanjing Normal University that address a host of structural challenges facing China and India in pursuit of sustainable development in the early twenty-first century. Pan Zhen gives a critical overview of China’s economic policies, and finds the top-down development model to be fraught with tensions. Joseph Tse-Hei Lee argues that the ability of China to pursue sustainable growth and social betterment is largely contingent upon many circumstantial factors, especially the negative attributes of globalization and the rise of domestic discontents. Satish K. Kolluri shifts the focus of discussion to the electoral victory of Narendra Modi in India, and examines the implications of the rise of Modi in domestic and regional politics. These essays throw light on the political and socioeconomic trajectories of China and India. Since both countries have significantly liberalized their economies in recent decades, the unprecedented expansion of their capabilities and influences is a complex phenomenon, rooted in the context of particular temporal and spatial settings, and the need to accommodate endogenous and exogenous forces of change

Whose nation is it anyway? Nationalism and the metaphorics of secular subjectivity

My dissertation analyzes the processes of subject formation through the civilizing missions of nationalism and secularism in India, and toward that end, provides a secular critique of the resurgence of Hindu nationalism, which seeks to unify the nation in the name of “one nation, one culture, one people.” After providing an introduction to the some of the dominant theories of nationalism, I compare the works of Partha Chatterjee and Jacques Derrida in terms of the different ways in which they consider their subjectivities as derived, the former through European history and the latter through the French language. Afterwards, I argue that it is necessary to draw a parallel relation between political and cultural modes of belonging to the nation with the psychological experience of nationhood. After raising the problematic relationship that psychoanalysis shares with history and postcolonial theory, I employ Slavoj Zizek\u27s psychoanalytic theory to theorize the subject of Hindu nationalism. Then, I introduce the gendered and sexualized subject of the nation and highlight its problematic relationship with the essentially male discourse of nationalism. Specifically, I analyze ‘lesbian subjectivity’ and its exclusion by patriarchal and heterosexual discourse of Hindu nationalism, which posits the citizen-body as a male, homo-social entity through Deepa Mehta\u27s film Fire. Following that, I raise the problematic of translation of secularism in the Indian context and the inherent challenges present in articulating a ‘secular subjectivity’ in a space that is fraught with the discourses of modernity, nativism, nationalism and religion. I argue that in spite of the problems of political translation that secularism faces, it behooves us to retrieve a secular subjectivity that stands in strong opposition to the discourses of religious fundamentalism in India. Finally, I argue that the act of religious conversion on part of low caste Hindus to Islam and Christianity is actually a performance of cultural criticism, which puts on the anvil the Hindu majoritarian agenda to ‘Indianize, Hinduize, and Spiritualize’ the nation of India

Rethinking conversion : beyond the religious and the secular

This article seeks to pinpoint some of the consequences of the secularization process – conceived as the dissociation of religion from both state politics and culture – with the aim of broadening the conceptualization of conversion. Conversion is therefore considered to be a social fact beyond the religious and the secular, for which the concept of 'trans-formation' is employed in order to grasp this phenomenon. The concept of trans-formation posits processes of conversion as shifts from intimate convictions to public values. From this perspective, based on a pragmatic sociology of values, religious conversions are put forth as one possible way to qualify trajectories that the concept of trans-formation aims to comprehend. The article ends by considering the status of religious convictions in comparison with convictions otherwise qualified