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Tuesday March 21:

Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries

Tuesday, March 21 at 5pm
CASE Building, room E422

Book talk by Jodi Kim, Professor, Media & Cultural Studies, University of California Riverside

Jodi Kim’s research and teaching interests are at the intersections of Asian American studies, critical ethnic and race studies, postcolonial theory, feminist epistemologies, and critiques of US empire and militarism.  Her first book, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), offers a critique of American empire in Asia through an interdisciplinary analysis of Asian American cultural productions and their critical intersections with Cold War geopolitics and logics. Her second book, Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2022) theorizes how the United States extends its sovereignty across Asia and the Pacific in the post-World War II era through a militarist settler imperialism that is leveraged on debt as a manifold economic and cultural relation undergirded by asymmetries of power. Kim demonstrates that despite being the largest debtor nation in the world, the United States positions itself as an imperial creditor that imposes financial and affective indebtedness alongside a disciplinary payback temporality even as it evades repayment of its own debts. Kim reveals this process through an analysis of how a wide array of transpacific cultural productions creates antimilitarist and decolonial imaginaries that diagnose US militarist settler imperialism while envisioning alternatives to it. 

Free and open to the public
Event Co-Sponsored by The English Department, Media Studies, Ethnic Studies, Asian Languages and Civilizations.

Technophany and the Sacralisation of Infrastructure in India and Thailand

Tuesday, March 21 at 4pm
Paleo Hall, CU Boulder Museum of Natural History

This will be a public lecture by Professor Kenneth George, (Anthropology) The Australian National University, as part of a two-talk series for this year's Distinguished Lecture in Cultural Anthropology. He and his partner, Professor Kirin Narayan, are co-PIs of a multi-year, multi-sited project on the renewed interest in venerating Vishwakarma in contemporary India. Vishwakarma, the deity associated with craft and artisanal work, has recently become much more visible and linked to national industry, making him the god of India's new infrastructure boom. 

The rise of industrial capitalism in South and Southeast Asia since the late 19th century has been accompanied by rites that aim to bring emerging infrastructures, technologies, and objects of manufacture into alignment with the cosmos.  Most prominent among these rites are those tied to the worship of the Hindu-Buddhist deity known in India as Vishwakarma, and in Thailand as Witsanukam.  This god and his manifestation in ritual do not stand outside of technological practices and assemblage, but occasion a time of “technophany,” a time in which societies of technical ensembles and beings are made visible and wondrous to devotees and their publics.  Using the conceptual framework of technophany, and drawing from historical study and team-based ethnographic fieldwork in both India and Thailand (2017-2019, and 2022), this comparative look at Vishwakarma worship calls for a rethinking of frameworks that would treat religion and technology as ontologically distinct domains. 

Free and open to the public
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Center for the Humanities and Arts,and the Center for Asian Studies.

Thursday, March 23:

Artisans and Ancestors in India’s Ellora Caves

Thursday, March 23, 2023 at 4pm
Paleo Hall, Museum of Natural History, CU Boulder

Kirin Narayan, Professor of Anthropology The Australian National University

Ellora, Western India, is a World Heritage Site with 34 magnificent Buddhist, Hindu and Jain cave temples excavated and sculpted into the scarp of a basalt mountain. These caves, made between the 6th and 10th centuries CE, have long attracted pilgrims, travellers, and scholars, some of whom have left records of encounters across the centuries. Learning of a story transmitted among hereditary artisans in Western India (particularly Rajasthan and Gujarat) that their ancestors were responsible for the skilled shaping of these caves, I became curious about this claim and its imaginative consequences. The focus of artisans’ worship at Ellora has historically been Cave 10, a seventh-century Buddhist shrine featuring a towering seated Buddha viewed by hereditary artisans as the deity Vishwakarma, “Maker of the Universe.” Following clues to understand this relationship propelled research beyond ethnography towards engagement with diverse disciplinary arenas, fieldsites, and collaborations. The emerging “questography” brings alternative, artisan-centered perspectives to this celebrated ancient site, even as their focus on the mysteries and dangers of making hold insights for the crafting of unusual texts. 

Free and open to the public
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Center for the Humanities and Arts,and the Center for Asian Studies.