This 2-day convening aims to explore the ongoing impact of Iberian histories in South Asia in shaping identities, social distinction, histories of merchant and commercial capitalism. We bring to the longue durée inquiry of Luso-Hispanic globality (15th century and beyond) a unique focus on histories of music and performance in South Asia and the Americas, particularly in Brazil. The conference brings together scholars, musicians, journalists, and other cultural producers to participate in a series of panel discussions and concerts at Yale University over two days.

Registration for the conference is available via Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/Iberian-soundscapes

Background:

Luso-Hispanic trade relations, settlements, and intimacies constituted a critical aspect of Spanish and Portuguese colonial expansion to the Americas, Asia, and Africa. We are especially keen to understand how Portuguese presence in South Asia markedly reshaped social and legal structures of caste, race, gender, and religion, even as they set the terms by which new mixed race communities would emerge in South Asia, or along coastal Africa, and Brazil, how these processes relate to the trade in human chattel, and new extractive economies--that assemblage which is today referred to by the term racial capitalism--but which demand broader rubrics to consider Portuguese mixed-racial categories that obscure race through assimilation, including in Portuguese-Indian formations of caste and other types of marginalization and difference that mark specific histories of labor, property, and merchant capitalism in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
 
North American studies of race tend to focus on Atlantic histories of race-making and Protestant histories of liberal humanism. Portuguese and Spanish histories demand a different lens that accounts for the work of Catholicism and merchant capitalism that proliferated religious and racial categories as a means to regulate social mobility, land rights, and labor. Religious orders such as the Society of Jesus transformed Indigenous rituals of performance and music in efforts to Christianize local populations. The concept-metaphor of race in the Indian Ocean thus developed a distinct mode of discourse that begs how performance, music, and ritual formed part of histories of race and caste formation. This convening aims to bring together academics, journalists, and musicians to explore the role of race, caste, gender, music, and performance to consider the myriad ways that music, ritual, and performance have worked as forms of political affect in colonial and national projects, as well as in grassroots constitutionalism and political movements.

Program

Friday, October 7

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.       WELCOME
K. David Jackson (Yale, Prof. of Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Cultures
Sunil Amrith (Yale, Prof. of History) Anupama Rao (Barnard, Prof. of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies)

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Naresh Fernandes, “Sitar Goes Latin” (Editor, Scroll; author of Taj Mahal Foxtrot)
 
2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. INTRODUCTION TO SOUNDSCAPES
Kevin A. Fellezs, “Learning to Listen with Empathy” (Columbia, Prof. African American Studies and Director of Center for Jazz Studies)

3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. SOUNDSCAPES IN BRAZIL AND INDIA Susana Sardo, “Listening to the Post-Empire: Fado and Mando in Goa as Performative Devices for Cultural Sovereignty” (University of Aveiro, Assoc. Prof. of Ethnomusicology)

Micah Oelze, “Racial Counterpart, Colonial Rescoring: The Politics of Psychomusical Realism in Brazil’s Interwar Concert Scores” (Adelphi University, Assistant Prof. of Latin American History)

Gérald Estadieu, “Soundscape.AI – Sonic Perspectives on Macau” (Univ. of St. Joseph, Assistant Prof. in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences)

Pedro Aragão, “Connecting Sound Archives in Lusophone Countries: Challenges and Questions of the Libersound Project” (Univ. of Rio de Janiero, Assistant Prof. of Musicology

MODERATOR: K. David Jackson

5p.m. - 6:00 p.m.       RECEPTION
Henry Luce Common Room
6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.     CONCERT
An Evening of Indian Ragas and Talas

8:00 p.m. DINNER FOR INVITEES Barcelona Wine Bar (155 Temple St.)

Saturday, October 7
9:00 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.        BREAKFAST

9:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.      THE SOCIAL SPACE OF MUSIC AND SOUNDS IN MUMBIA
Aneesh Pradhan (Online) “Patronage, Migration, and Performance: Goan Practitioners of Hindustani Music in Colonial Bombay” (Musician, Performer, Composer)

Rasika Ajotikar (Online) “Music and Anti-Caste Thought in Modern Western India” (Univ. of Hildesheim, Jr. Prof. of Ethnomusicology)

Urmila Bhirdikar (Online) “Riots and Ragas in Bhendi Bazaar: An Exploratory Report on a Place behind a Market in Colonial Bombay” (Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence, DELHI-NCR, Assoc. Prof. of Sociology)

MODERATOR: Anupama Rao

11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.       ACCOUSTIC JUSTICE IN BRAZIL AND INDIA
Sérgio Infante, “Hearing Wrong? Hearing Right? Diplomacy, Development, and Brazil-India Relations” (Yale, Ph.D. Candidate in Global History)

Ana-Luiza de A. Claudio, “The Sounds and Echoes of the Alleys and Streets: A Perspective on the Oral Histories of the Rocinha Memory Project” (Columbia, Ph.D. Candidate in Latin American and Iberian Cultures)

Marcos Balter, “Camdomblé as a Point of Creative Departure” (Columbia, Prof. of Music)

MODERATOR: Ana Paulina Lee
 
1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.         LUNCH
2:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.         SOUNDSCAPES IN CABO VERDE AND INDIA
Ângela Barreto Xavier, “The ‘New English America’ in a Brahmin Conspiracy against the Portuguese Imperial Domination” (Institute of Social Sciences at Univ. of Lisbon, Historian and Senior Researcher)

Ana Flávia Miguel, “An Irreplaceable Queen: Thoughts on Cape Verdean Music” (Univ. of Aveiro, Researcher of Ethnomusicology)

Felipa Vicente, “Words without Images (1860s - 1900s): Photography in Goa and by Goans, Before and Beyond Souza” (Institute of Social Sciences at Univ. of Lisbon, Historian and Researcher)

MODERATOR: Stuart Schwartz and Lisa Voigt
 
4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.        RECEPTION
Henry Luce Hall Auditorium
 
6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.         CONCERT
Brazilian Bandolim Virtuoso Tiago Souza Presents: Choro - Samba - Jazz

8:00 p.m.                           DINNER FOR INVITEES Atelier Florian (1166 Chapel St.)

Speakers

Marcos Balter (Columbia)
Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University. He’s the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, Tanglewood Music Center Leonard Bernstein Fellowship, and two Chamber Music America Awards. He has been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Orquestra do Estado de São Paulo, Geneva Camerata, Fromm Foundation, The MacArthur Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. His works are published by PSNY (Schott), and commercial recordings of his music are available through New Amsterdam Records, New Focus Recording, Parlour Tapes+, and Navona Records.
 
Naresh Fernandes is a journalist who lives in Bombay. He is the editor of Scroll.in, a digital daily, and a consulting editor at National Geographic Traveller India. Naresh was previously editor-in-chief of Time Out India, which has editions in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. He has also worked at The Times of India and the Associated Press in Mumbai, and The Wall Street Journal in New York. He is the author of the widely acclaimed and prize-winning book, Taj Mahal Foxtrot: the definitive history of Bombay’s jazz age from the 1930s-1960s (Roli Books?, 2012); the product of many years of research, it was written up during his tenure as a Poeisis Fellow at the Institute of Public Knowledge at New York University. In his words, the book is about ‘listening to the city through the ears of its jazz fans and its jazz musicians.’ Naresh maintains an active blog on the archival material excavating through the work on Taj Mahal Foxtrot and has most recently authored a new book, City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay (Aleph books, 2013). His expertise on the transnational musical histories of the Goan and Anglo-Indian communities in India make him an invaluable addition to Modern Moves.
 
Ana Paulina Lee (Columbia) is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. She is the author of Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory (Stanford UP). Her research and teaching interests focus on formations of race, gender, nation, and citizenship; slavery and abolition, postcolonial studies; subaltern studies; literary theory; visual culture and performance, and cultural studies with a focus on 19th and 20th century Brazil and Luso-Hispanic Asia.
 
Anupama Rao (Columbia) is Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University with research and teaching interests in gender and sexuality studies; caste and race; historical anthropology; social theory; comparative urbanism; and colonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism.

Registration for the conference is available via Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/Iberian-soundscapes

Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City will convene a symposium exploring the ongoing impact of Luso-Hispanic globality in shaping identities, social distinctions, histories of merchant and commercial capitalism, and histories of aesthetic production and performance. How were Luso-Hispanic trade relations, settlements, and intimacies constituted a critical aspect of Spanish and Portuguese colonial expansion to the Americas, Asia, and Africa? How did Portuguese presence in South Asia reshaped social structures of caste, gender, and religion, even as they set the terms by which new mixed race communities would emerge in Southeast Asia and coastal Africa? How did these processes relate to the trade in human chattel and the emergence of new extractive economies (currently referred to as racial capitalism), which resulted in an epochal geohistorical transition away from more dispersed, if complexly organized, social formations of early modernity, to enable the ideological and the economic dominance of the North Atlantic?

For more information, email adc2204@columbia.edu.

CANCELLED

Presented by the Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City working group

During the nineteenth century, Bombay was India’s leading steam-shipping port and held the unique position of sending people, capital, cultural practices, and new ideas about urbanism and working-class culture across the ocean. However, since the 1960s, Bombay has become increasingly decentered and has given way to city-states such as Singapore and Hong Kong, which are organized around new capital flows such as real estate speculation and container shipping. We seek to understand this shift by examining the maritime and historical roots of contemporary urban Bombay and the endurance of these roots during the remaking of built and social formations in other Indian Ocean cities. Little is known about the endurance of these roots and exchanges that may underpin the twenty-first century Asian city because scholarship on colonial and post-colonial urbanism has largely overlooked these cities’ maritime pasts. This conference intervenes in and connects the fields of Urban and Indian Ocean Studies by studying Bombay comparatively with other Indian Ocean cities. Our conference takes the nodal centrality of Bombay as a place from which to explore the specificity, stakes, and consequences of what might be termed “Indian Ocean urbanisms.” Thus, we ask: how did Indian Ocean cities constitute each other? What ocean-wide mental and material structures allowed urban forms and practices to move between port cities, and how did they persist and change with colonial and post-colonial governance? How does this shared past continue to shape contemporary urbanism and the new Asian regional economy?

There is a long and well-established tradition of addressing the Atlantic World as a connected system, especially through the slave trade and its interconnections across Africa, Europe, and the New World. If studies of the Atlantic have shown enduring material and mental formations of the ocean created by the slave trade and consequent diasporas, Indian Ocean scholarship can reveal enduring social worlds created by long-standing networks of kin and capital. This is the first conference of its kind to highlight Bombay’s importance as a center of movement and commerce across the Indian Ocean and the distinctive spatial orders this produced; to analyze Bombay beyond its colonial status; and to connect emerging work on the Indian Ocean region with scholarship on the Atlantic and Pacific regions. Nine selected presentations will focus on change and continuity in Bombay’s urban life as a result of ongoing relationships with other Indian Ocean cities of Singapore, Yangon, Manama, and Dar es Salaam. The papers showcase new ways of reading Bombay’s urbanism: as shaped by shared itineraries of design aesthetics and planning policy (and the experts behind them); as a configured   organization of environmental and climate knowledge, especially the monsoons; as a site of anticolonial internationalism and alternative to Bandung; and as a built form funded by merchant families spread across the Indian Ocean network. The presentations intervene methodologically by drawing on the methods of urban history, labor history, and science and technology studies to study oceanic networks. However, what is distinctive to this enterprise is its focus on the scale of the urban, the relationship between built form, visual cultures, and social life, and the organization of economic life, which continue to shape the relationship between ocean and city. We take built form to be a materialization of capital flows and an important trace of the social lives of labor and community across the Indian Ocean. We wager that comparison across hierarchies of urban order will allow us to consider the place of Indian Ocean urbanism during this moment of resurgence across East Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.

Faculty organizers:
Anupama P. Rao (Barnard History and MESAAS, Columbia), Amy Chazkel (History, Columbia)

Graduate Student organizers:
Laura Yan (History, Columbia), Sohini Chattopadhyay (History, Columbia). 

Schedule

Friday, March 13

5:00 pm-7:30 pm
Plenary Session: Built Forms, Social Histories, and the Environment: The Makings of Indian Ocean Urbanisms

Discussant and Chair: Anupama Rao, Barnard History and MESAAS, Columbia University

Plenary Speakers:
Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University
Nancy Um, SUNY-Binghamton University
Mustansir Dalvi, Sir JJ College of Architecture, University of Mumbai

Saturday, March 14

9:30 am Breakfast

10:00 am-12:00 pm
Panel 1: Oceanic Urban Histories

Discussant: Debjani Bhattacharyya, Drexel University
Darren Wan, Cornell University, “Nationalist Narration and the Horizons of Anticolonial Internationalism: Evacuating Singapore for Bombay During the Japanese War”
Thomas McDow, Ohio State University, “Seeing Muscat from Bombay: Intellectual Networks of Indian Ocean Port Cities”

12:00 pm-1:00 pm Lunch

1:00 pm-3:30 pm
Panel 2: Social Formations in Port Cities

Discussant: Sheetal Chhabria, Connecticut College
Gaurav Garg, NYU, “Banking on the City: Place of Urban Land in Housing and Industrial Finance in Calcutta and Bombay, c.1920-1970”
Michael Sugarman, University of Bristol, “Differentiating the Deserving: Water, the environment, and an Indian Ocean urbanism in Bombay and Rangoon, 1860-1941”
Radhika Gupta, Leiden Institute for Area Studies, “(Re-) scaling urbanism from the city to the community: Notes from Bombay and Dar es Salaam”

3:30 pm Tea and coffee

4:00 pm–6:00 pm
Panel 3: Built Form and Urban Sensoria

Discussant: Abigail McGowan, University of Vermont
Urna Mukherjee, Johns Hopkins University, “Uncertain Geographies and Urban Development: The Geographical Imagination of Colonial Bombay and the “Drainage” Debates of the 1860s”
Tim Riding, University of York, “Company Urbanism: Colonial Failure at Bombay, 1668-1790”

6:00-6:15pm Closing Remarks 

Directions:

The closest subway station to the campus is the 116th Street station on 116th Street and Broadway. This station is located on the 1 line.

The M60 bus route also stops at 116th and Broadway on the route to and from LaGuardia Airport.

The Heyman Center for the Humanities is located at the East Campus residential complex. Enter the main Columbia gates at 116th Street and Broadway and walk up the steps of Low Library. Turn right (east) at the top of the first set of steps and keep walking east until you come to Philosophy Hall. Turn left (north) at Philosophy Hall and walk until you see a ramp on your right going (east) over Amsterdam Avenue.

Take that ramp and walk straight ahead, past the law school on your right and Casa Italiana and the International Affairs Building on your left until you come to a short flight of steps going into the East Campus Residential Center. Take those steps, which will bring you to a security booth for East Campus Residential housing.

Show a picture ID to the guard and walk straight (north) through the courtyard. You will see the Heyman Center building in front of you.

Two Alternative Routes: 

Enter the Wien Hall Gate on 116th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive. Walk past Wien Hall, then turn right and make a sharp turn up the staircase to the left, which leads to East Campus. Check in with the guard and follow the sign to the Heyman Center.

Enter the International Affairs Building at 420 118th Street. Take the elevators to the 6th Floor and exit the building through the southern doors. The entrance to East Campus will be at the far left (southeastern) corner of the courtyard. Take the stairs up to East Campus. Check in with the guard and walk through the courtyard to the Heyman Center. 

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the History Department, and the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department