Love and Hate in South Asia: Rethinking humanity after 1971

Love and Hate in South Asia: Rethinking humanity after 1971
Keynote address by Yasmin Saikia
Critical Approaches to South Asian Studies Workshop, York University
February 26- 27, 2015

Remembered experiences of violence, humiliation, and loss suffered in the 1971 war of Bangladesh provide potent materials for rethinking a new narrative bonding victim and perpetrator communities in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Using the war as my entry point, I explore survivors oral narratives to understand how love for nation and hate toward their perceived enemies created and revealed the distances with others to violate them. More than four decades later, survivors – men and women from Bangladesh and Pakistan – search for a human identity beyond national labels for imagining history in the subcontinent that is discontinuous but interconnected. The “narrative hospitality” (Ricoeur, 1992) of victims and perpetrators exchanging memories for self-recognition and intersubjective relationship with others suggests a possibility of recognizing and coexisting with a variety of others in memory. The quest of survivors is not to find identity, but to create a common ground signaling an awareness of human connections for achieving true human freedom in the sub-continent.

More info: https://casasw2015.wordpress.com/keynote-yasmin-saikia/

CASASW 2015 Keynote Speaker: Yasmin Saikia

We are happy to announce that our keynote speaker for the 2015 Critical Approaches to South Asian Studies Workshop is Yasmin Saikia!

Professor Yasmin Saikia is the Hardt-Nickachos Chair in Peace Studies at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict and a Professor of History in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Her research and teaching interests invoke a dynamic transnational and interdisciplinary dialogue situated at the intersection of history, culture, and religion. With a specific focus on contestations and accommodations in South Asia between local, national, and religious identities, she examines the Muslim experience in India, Pakistan, and Bangaldesh, and the discourse of nonviolence alongside the practice of violence against women and vulnerable groups.

Selected Publications:

A People’s Remembrance of 1971 in Tanqeed

Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, published by Duke University Press