This conference focuses on three areas of the study of Pakistan: art and architectural history; urban studies; and cultural history. It brings together leading academics, including:
- Iftikhar Dadi - Associate Professor, Departments of History of Art and Art, Cornell University
- Kishwar Rizvi – Associate Professor, Department of History and Art, Yale, historian of Islamic Art and Architecture
- Haris Gazdar – Senior Researcher, Collective for Social Science Research, Karachi
- Rabia Nadir - Assistant Professor and Acting Head of the Centre for Media Studies, Lahore School of Economics
- Manan Ahmed - Assistant Professor, Department of History, Columbia University
- Framji Minwalla - Chair, Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts,Institute of Business Administration, Karachi
- Kamran Asdar Ali - Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology; and Director, South Asia Institute, University of Texas, Austin
This conference has been organized in conjunction with the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, with co-sponsorship from the Department of the History of Art.
April 4, 2015 | Room 1636 School of Social Work Building
9:30-9:45: Welcome
Farina Mir & Kamran Asdar Ali
9:45-11:00: Panel I: Art/Architectural History
Chair: Will Glover, Associate Professor, Departments of History and Architecture, University of Michigan
Presenters
Iftikhar Dadi, Associate Professor, Departments of History of Art and Art, Cornell University
Contemporary Art in Pakistan: Challenges and Opportunities
This talk will outline trajectories of contemporary art in Pakistan over the last three decades. It will delineate some of the salient themes investigated by artists such as tradition, and popular culture. It will also discuss the institutional and discursive conditions that render legibility and value to contemporary art, which include higher education for studio training, and the activity of patrons, galleries, and curators within Pakistan and outside.
Kishwar Rizvi, Associate Professor, Department of History and Art, Yale, historian of Islamic Art and Architecture
Betwixt and Between: Writing the Architectural History of Pakistan
Mohenjo-daro, Makli, and the Mazar of Qaid-i Azam present three key moments in the history of the Indian Subcontinent. The ancient, Indo-Islamic, and nationalist narratives that they represent have also come to define Pakistan. Their images are displayed on stamps and tourism posters and their significance propagated in classrooms throughout the country. Yet each of these monuments also points to connections far removed from the sovereign borders of Pakistan, whether through their patrons' religious identity or political allegiance. This paper discusses the challenges facing the architectural historian in fieldwork across national borders and the impact they may have on the methodologies used by historians of South Asia more generally.
Comment: Christiane Gruber, Associate Professor, History of Art Department, University of Michigan
11:00-11:15: Break
11:15-12:45: Panel II: Exploring the Urban
Chair: Matthew Hull, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan
Presenters
Rabia Nadir, Assistant Professor and Acting Head of the Centre for Media Studies, Lahore School of Economics
From Walled City to Small City: Interrogating Development and Growth
This presentation will share findings of research conducted in the historical inner city of Lahore and emerging from ongoing research on three small cities of Punjab. The research on the Walled City of Lahore focused on a settlement of Pathan migrants in a hub of small-scale production, commerce, lower class community and rich commons undergoing rapid commercial growth and development. This growth and development was determined by the liberalization of imports and the policy of cities as engines of growth. The small cities of Bhera, Chakwal and Wazirabad share many aspects of scale, community, small manufacture, historical spatial morphology, mass exodus of non-Muslims in 1947 partition etc., with Lahore, in addition to being unique, peripheral centres in the larger urban system. Preliminary research in these cities has helped illuminate more complex genealogies, mutations and trajectories of social change in times of neo-liberal globalization as well as reiterate a broad declensionist narrative. The small city research is part of group research by members of the faculty of Environment Science and Policy at the Lahore School of Economics.
Haris Gazdar, Senior Researcher, Collective for Social Science Research, Karachi
Engaging Disciplines
The city has been a site of productive collaborations across disciplines in the social sciences and beyond. This paper speaks about the value and pitfalls of working across disciplines using examples from recent work on Karachi’s politics which takes in demography, ethnography, economics and sociology. The city also has hunger for knowledge about itself – a condition that offers professional knowledge producers otherwise rare opporunities for engagement. Here too, there are rewards and hazards, some of which are highlighted from experiences of recent encounters between the two.
Comment: Will Glover, Associate Professor, Departments of History and Architecture, University of Michigan
12:45-2:00: Lunch
2:00-4: Panel III: Cultural History
Chair: Juan Cole, Professor, Department of History, University of Michigan
Presenters
Framji Minwalla, Chair, Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts,Institute of Business Administration, Karachi
Pakistan, bless thee. Thou art translated: Ruptures, Continuities, and the Struggle for Relevance in Pakistani Performance
Performance involves multiple acts of translation. Whether from language to language, from page to actor to stage to audience, from the past to the present, from culture to culture, or from the indicative to the subjunctive and back, all these translations reproduce tangled narratives about identity, agency, legitimacy, and authenticity, especially as they attempt to define and describe local habitations in opposition to what often seems like a global media onslaught. In Pakistan (though not of course only in Pakistan) these narratives constitute profoundly unstable frames of thinking and being, living and working, unstable particularly in the instant of most strident assertion.
This talk explores how such a theoretical framing might suggest avenues for research, and encourage smarter conversations among theorists and practitioners that could push performance in Pakistan forward in productive ways.
Manan Ahmed, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Columbia University
Local, Regional and Universal History, Now or Then: A View from Uch Sharif
The paper examines questions of space, scale, distance, alterity in the writing of history. It focuses on three Persian histories written between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries. It presents the geographic and temporal imagination within these texts. The paper then critically engages with contemporary theories of connected or global histories to think through particular challenges facing the historians of Pakistan or northern India.
Kamran Asdar Ali, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology; and Director, South Asia Institute, University of Texas, Austin
On Female Friendships: Homosociality and Desire in Pakistani Cinema
The passage of Muslim Personal Law in 1948, which gave women the right to inheritance under Shari’a, and that of Family Law Ordinance in 1961, are seen as major victories in the struggle for civil and gender rights in Pakistan. The Family Law Ordinance provided some legal curbs against polygamy, expanded the right for women to initiate divorce proceedings and also dealt favorably with inheritance rights for women.
This move by the military government was not always reflected in its cultural politics. The same year the Family Ordinance was passed, the film Saheli (1960) received five President of Pakistan medals for different categories.
The film, although immensely popular at the box office (it also won four Nigar awards, Pakistan’s most prestigious film awards), has been criticized by liberal circles as normalizing the practice of polygamy in post-independence Pakistan. Similarly, it may be considered an irony that a regime that had passed law creating restrictions on polygamous marriages would bestow awards on a film that ostensibly propagated the same system. Irrespective of the award committees and their decisions and the politics surrounding polygamy, what is underappreciated about the film in my opinion is the social bonding the two female protagonists share in the movie. In this short paper I argue that the on screen affection between the two friends accounts for the story to allow them to marry the same man so they may be together. This analysis enables me to open up an argument about women’s representation in the popular media in Pakistan in order to create a different archive of women’s cultural politics and histories.
Comment: Yasmin Saikia, Professor, Department of History, Arizona State University
4:00-4:15: Break
4:15: Wrap-up Discussion & Future Directions
This conference has been organized in conjunction with the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, with co-sponsorship from the Department of the History of Art.
Manan Ahmed
Manan Ahmed is interested in the relationship between text, space and narrative. His work on Islam’s arrival to Sindh in the 8th century traces the longue durée history of contestations among varied communities in South Asia. His areas of specialization include political and cultural history of Islam in South and Southeast Asia, frontier-spaces and the city in medieval South Asia, imperial and colonial historiography, and philology. He is involved in Digital Humanities projects - especially with visualizing space in medieval texts and textualizing medieval and early-modern maps. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University.
Kamran Asdar Ali
Kamran Asdar Ali is associate professor of anthropology and the Director of the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves (UT Press, 2002) and the co-editor of Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa (Palgrave 2008) and Comparing Cities: Middle East and South Asia (Oxford 2009). He has published several articles on issues of health and gender in Egypt and on urban issues, labor history, gender and popular culture in Pakistan. He recently co-edited the volume Gender, Politics and Performance in South Asia (Oxford 2015) and is the author of the forthcoming book, Communism in Pakistan: Politics and Class Activism 1947-1972 (IB Tauris).
Iftikhar Dadi
Iftikhar Dadi is Associate Professor at Cornell University in the Department of History of Art. He also served as Chair of the Department of Art (2010-14). Research interests include postcolonial theory and modern art and popular culture, with emphasis on South and West Asia. Publications include the book Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (University of North Carolina Press 2010), and essays that have appeared in numerous journals and edited volumes. He is Contributing Editor for Bio-Scope: South Asian Screen Studies journal, and is currently working on a book on Urdu cinema.
Curated exhibitions include Lines of Control (with Hammad Nasar) on partitions and borders (Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell, 2012 and Nasher Museum at Duke, 2013); and Tarjama/Translation (with Leeza Ahmady and Reem Fadda) on the contemporary art of the Middle East and Central Asia (Queens Museum of Art, 2009 and Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art, 2010).
As an artist he collaborates with Elizabeth Dadi, they have shown widely internationally. Exhibitions include the 24th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil; the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial, Australia; Walker Art Center, Minnesota; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Queens Museum of Art, New York; and Art Gallery of Windsor, Canada. Work has been included in numerous publications and exhibition catalogs including Fresh Cream (Phaidon Press) and reviewed in Art Monthly, The Guardian (UK) and The New York Times.
Haris Gazdar
Haris Gazdar works on social policy and political economy issues. He has taught as well as conducted academic research in the UK, India, and Pakistan. Current research interests include Karachi, and women’s work in agriculture. Besides his academic and consultancy assignments, he has worked on an honorary basis as adviser to research programmes, government and non-governmental organizations, and political parties.
Framji Minwalla
Framji Minwalla is currently the Chair of the Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts at the Institute of Business Administration—Karachi. He has taught at a number of different institutions including Yale University, Vassar College, Dartmouth College, the George Washington University, New York University, Fordham University, and SZABIST. His research interests include Performance Literature and History; Visual and Cultural Studies; Theater and Politics; Media and Film; and all forms of theory (linguistic, political, dramatic, visual, queer, literary or otherwise). His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled Writing Theater’s Histories, an interrogation of 20th century performance historiography. Dr. Minwalla was awarded a B.A. (1987) by the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor, and an M.F.A. (1991) and a D.F.A. (2000) both by the Yale School of Drama.
Rabia Nadir
Rabia Nadir is an Assistant Professor and Acting Head of the Centre for Media Studies at the Lahore School of Economics. She has a joint appointment in the Department of Environment Science and Policy Studies where she teaches courses in Urban and Community Studies. She received her B.Arch. from Pratt Institute N.Y. in 1988 and an MPhil in Environment Science and Policy from the Lahore School of Economics in 2013. Her MPhil research focused on Pathan migrant settlement in the historical Walled City of Lahore. Her present research interests focus on socio-ecological change in small cities in Pakistan. Earlier in her career she has been a practicing architect and full time instructor at the Departments of Architecture and Interior Design at the National College of Arts Lahore.
Kishwar Rizvi
Kishwar Rizvi is an historian of Islamic Art and Architecture. She has written on representations of religious and imperial authority in Safavid Iran, as well as on issues of gender, nationalism and religious identity in modern Iran and Pakistan. She is the author of The Safavid Dynastic Shrine: History, religion and architecture in early modern Iran (London: British Institute for Persian Studies, I. B. Tauris, 2011) and editor of Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and politics in the twentieth century (University of Washington Press, 2008), which was awarded a Graham Foundation publication grant. She is completing a new book, The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the contemporary Middle East (University of North Carolina Press, Fall 2015), for which she was selected as a Carnegie Foundation Scholar. Her current fieldwork includes research in several parts of the Middle East, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates.
