[ELTWeekly Volume 6, Issue 3 | January 27, 2014]
The Department Of English, Maharaja Sayajirao University Of Baroda is organizing UGC SAP DRS – II National Seminar ‘Theorizing Movements: Literary, Social And Cultural’ on March 24-25, 2014.
Seminar note issued by the department.
In the 1970s and 80s, India experienced a surge of political activism that gave rise to a phenomenon that is today called ‘new social movements’. Centered diversely around identities, languages and inequalities at various levels, these movements forced new questions on the nation. Simultaneously, they reconfigured understandings of the literary and cultural, generated new forms and genres that questioned existing hierarchies. In many ways these movements drew on the energies of the nationalist movement and progressive writers such as Munshi Premchand and Subramania Bharati. Yet, these movements raised new questions and charted new territories. The women’s movements, tribal movements, Dalit movements and regional movements, for instance, were primarily identitarian and had the effect of rendering visibility to oppressed groups. Although direct political activism played a key role at this juncture, cultural and literary movements fed into and shaped frameworks of perception.
Ghanshyam Shah, in his introduction to Social Movements in India: A Review of Literature (2004) has argued, “a study on ‘social movements’ cannot be confined by the boundaries of separate academic disciplines. It should have not so much more of an ‘inter-disciplinary’ approach as understood by academia, as it should be ‘non-disciplinary’ to avoid the burden of one or another discipline.” The fact that disciplinary borders in the academic world gave way precisely around this time went hand in hand with the challenge posed by these movements. Although social and political movements have substantially been examined by historians, sociologists and political scientists, they surely also need a different scrutiny, one which centrally engages the study of new literary movements and schools of creative discourse engendered by New Social Movements. These literary and cultural manifestations embodied upheaval and change and generated styles and idioms that challenged dominant formations in their struggle to represent ideologies of the concerned class, caste or gender. For example, Marathi Dalit poetry spearheaded by the brilliant verse of Namdeo Dhasal comes to mind. As does the work of Mahashweta Devi.
We hope that this seminar revisits that period in order to evaluate the manner in which the social, cultural and literary intersected. Such an endeavor, we feel, would feed into our understanding of our time today. The theorizing of these movements from the standpoint of current frames of reference could be a step in opening up new engagements with text, form, and discourse.
We invite papers that critically engage with the theme of the seminar. Please send abstracts latest by the 10 February 2014, to the conveners Neeti Singh at sufiandtheswan@ymail.com, Madhurita Choudhury at madhurita09@yahoo.co.in and Sachin Ketkar at sachinketkar@gmail.com. We shall intimate acceptance by 15 February.