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Please forward widely Inside Outside: Between Text and the World Call for Participants Submission deadline: November 3, 2006 4th Annual Graduate Student Conference on South Asia http://sagsc.uchicago.edu April 6-7, 2007 University of Chicago The fourth annual South Asian Graduate Student Conference at the University of Chicago will be held on April 6th and 7th, 2007. It will be in two sessions. Session One will be open to any and all outstanding scholarly work on South Asia. This portion of the conference welcomes traditional panels from all disciplines, such as Literature, History, Philology, Anthropology, History of Religions, Film Studies and so on. Submissions to this session do not have to follow any thematic limits-besides that of presenting perceptive scholarship on South Asia. Session Two will focus on the conference theme, "Inside Outside: Between Text and the World" and aims to cast off the strictures of specialized academic scholarship in favor of an oscillating dance of "the world, the text, and its critic"-as Edward Said put it. The goal of this session is to analyze the myriad strategies, and media, through which a scholar of South Asia (or indeed an historical figure of South Asia) might articulate her place betwixt the objects of her study (texts), and the world at large. Of course, texts themselves are worldly-events with sensuous particularity, as well as historical contingency. Recent scholarship has convincingly demonstrated that the marriage between self and knowledge, or scholar and state power, inside and outside, or knowledge and power is neither new nor particularly blissful in South Asia-which boasts of various such historical unions. Whether one considers the binding of caste and knowledge, or empire and knowledge, it is clear that knowledge production and ownership in South Asia (as elsewhere) is rarely either neutral or egalitarian. At the same time, there are many South Asians who broke (ultimately to redraw) such formulations, from Chanakya, to Akbar, to Tagore. What can these, and other, South Asians teach us about a scholar's journey from the acquisition of knowledge to the application of knowledge? What are the various forms this journey from inside to outside can take? Does one put on a mask, or shed one? Does one switch languages? Does an engagement with a larger world and context necessarily compromise or taint a scholar's work? Or does it in fact enrich it? How does the binary of inside/ outside manifest itself in South Asian texts and scholarship? The broader aim of session two is to create a forum for an emerging generation of scholars to participate in a day of self-examination, about our responsibility to engage with, and speak to, the world beyond the ivory tower (whether through political activism, digital media, print journalism, film, theatre, or other genres of non-academic writings). This session seeks to examine the intersection and overlap between the "perceived" insular world of academic work on South Asia and the worlds of artists, activists, and other "public" intellectuals. The goal is to explore (and explode) some of the tacitly accepted boundaries between these two worlds--between "serious" and "popular" history, "art" and critique, home and away, politician and philosopher, "history" and "memory", and finally between critical distance and the desire for engagement with the world at large. With such concerns paramount, the goal of this conference is to initiate a dialogue across disciplines, historical periods, language specializations and even media, in order to extend our understanding of the relationship between a text, the world and its critic in South Asia. We therefore strongly encourage graduate students working in various South Asian fields to consider how their work might, should, or shouldn't, relate to the world beyond academia. We invite papers, short films and posters from various disciplinary perspectives and according to various temporal logics. Our two invited speakers vividly embody this conference's spirit of engaging 'new' models. William Dalrymple, author of 'City of Djinns' and 'The Last Mughal', will be the first distinguished speaker-speaking from outside the academy. Prof. Sudipto Chatterjee, dramatist, filmmaker and teacher at the University of Berkeley, will be the second distinguished speaker. Submission guidelines: --Individual 20 minute paper proposals should consist of (i) contact information and (ii) an abstract (250 words). --Individual poster proposals should consist of (i) contact information and (ii) an abstract (250 words). --Individual video/ film proposals should consist of (i) contact information, (ii) an abstract (250 words) and if possible (iii) a link to a clip/ stills of the work. -- Guidelines and information about the poster and video sessions is available at the SAGCS website [http://sagsc.uchicago.edu/guidelines.html] Submission deadline: November 3, 2006 Proposals for either the general session, or the themed session "Inside Outside", or questions should be sent to Bulbul Tiwari at [log in to unmask] * * Film-Philosophy Email Discussion Salon. After hitting 'reply' please always delete the text of the message you are replying to. To leave, send the message: leave film-philosophy to: [log in to unmask] For help email: [log in to unmask], not the salon. **