Re-appraising Governmentality as a Mode of Power in Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia
The goal of this workshop is to explore some of the myriad questions that remain about the nature of governmental power in South Asia including: how to consider violence and sovereign powers within the power geometries of governmentality? How to consider the affectual-, aesthetic- and neuro-politics of the governmental? How to think beyond neo-liberalism? How to re-engage with subaltern concepts of silencing, memory, methodology and fragments in postcolonial governmentality studies? How to consider the mobility of imperial or international governmentalities?
| What |
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| When |
Nov 11, 2011 from 10:00 AM to 05:00 PM |
| Where | Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Studies, JNU |
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Re-appraising Governmentality as a Mode of Power in Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia
November 11, 2011
Jawarhalal Nehru Institute for Advanced Studies, JNU
Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, governmental rationality (‘governmentality’) has become central to understanding power not simply as repression but as an epistemological phenomenon that normatively produces subjects. Operating through a variety of institutions, discourses, procedures and analyses, this form of power employs ‘rational’ principles to regulate the bodies of those subjected to it in order to produce a well-managed and productive population. At its most powerful it generates an identification of interests between the domination of others and of the self in order to ensure that subjects transform themselves in an ‘improving’ direction. In the process it serves to construct the normative regularities of civil society.
The concept of governmentality has exerted an ever growing influence in South Asian studies, for scholars working on both colonial and post-colonial contexts. It has inspired South Asian work on “deep democracy” and urban governmentality (Appadurai, 2002), the politics of the governed (Chatterjee, 2004), the Indian public sphere and economy (Kalpagam, 2000, 2002), agrarian capital (Gidwani, 2008), cinema and the end of empire (Jaikumar, 2006), knowledge transfer and urban politics (McFarlane, 2011), colonial urbanism (Legg, 2007), health and hygiene (Heath, 2010), aesthetics and slum politics (Ghertner, 2010), gender and imperial social formations (Sinha, 2006), the colonial economy (Birla, 2009, Goswami, 2004), and race and violence (Kolsky, 2010). Such works have raised governmentality to the status of near-orthodoxy for much South Asian research. This has increased the scope and depth of research materials being brought to light, and has in turn provided substantial reflection on the core methodological and analytical questions at the heart of postcolonial governmentality studies, particularly the applicability of Foucault’s musings outside Europe or in the present, and the compatibility of Foucault’s work with that inspired by Marx, the Subaltern Studies group, or development studies.
The goal of this workshop is to explore some of the myriad questions that remain about the nature of governmental power in South Asia including: how
to consider violence and sovereign powers within the power geometries
of governmentality? How to consider the affectual-, aesthetic- and
neuro-politics of the governmental? How to think beyond neo-liberalism?
How to re-engage with subaltern concepts of silencing, memory,
methodology and fragments in postcolonial governmentality studies? How
to consider the mobility of imperial or international governmentalities?
Programme
10:00-12:00 Panel I: Scales of Governmentality: The Social, Political and Beyond
Steve Legg (Associate Professor, School of Geography, University of Nottingham) - “Scale and
Governmentality: Nature, Networks and Nominalism”
Prathama Banerjee (Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) - “The Social & the
Political: Thoughts on governmentality, ungovernability and democracy in India”
Asha Sarangi (Associate Professor, Centre for Political Studies, JNU) - Discussant
12:00-1:00 Lunch
1:00-3:00 Panel II: Citizenship and Governance
Anupama Roy (Associate Professor, Centre for Political Studies, JNU) - “Liminal and Legible:
Tracing the Topological Terrain of Citizenship in the 1950s”
Aditya Nigam (Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) - “Beyond
Governmentality: Languages of Politics, Languages of Corruption”
Nivedita Menon (Professor, Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, JNU) –
Discussant
3:30-5:00 Round Table: “Re-Appraising South Asian Governmentalit(ies)”
Chair, Deana Heath (ICCR Senior Fellow, Department of History, Delhi
University)
