*AT 11am ET / 4pm UK / 6pm Palestine*
India and Israel use the convergence of the logic of colonialism and capitalism, as well as their narrative fortifications, to strengthen their processes of violent state-building and colonial and settler colonial consolidation.
This lecture will discuss how the Indian and Israeli projects of economic liberalization overlap with one another in areas such as defensle, security, sustainability, and infrastructure. It will contextualise the role played by each component in contributing to each state’s respective colonial and settler projects and the entrenchment of authoritarian rule in both. The most notable examples include the Israeli involvement in the BJP’s flagship Make in India campaign and the privatization of the Haifa Port, since purchased by the India-based Adani Group.
Register on Zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_5ggQoBeUSIm8-xRfjdw5Jg
Abdulla Moaswes is a Palestinian writer and educator. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Exeter, where his work broadly explores the globalisation of settler colonial logics with a special focus on the colonisations of Palestine and Kashmir. Abdulla has previously written about the politics of food and the socio-political role of internet memes across South and West Asia. As well as this, Abdulla also writes poetry and speculative fiction.
Virinder Singh Kalra's academic work examines the multiple ways in which culture is used as the basis of peoples' resistance to hegemony. In South Asia the boundaries between India and Pakistan are weakended through the practices of musicians and writers, which is central to his book Sacred and Secular Musics, Bloomsbury Press. In this text he engages a postcolonial analysis with the field of ethnomusicology, forwarding the role of the native musician as the interpreter and conveyor of religious texts. This inverts the normative accounts of musicians in South Asia which place them at the bottom of the social hierarchy and also of religious hierarchy in which texts are given a superordinate role. The wide range of his academic work is underpinned by an account of processes of resistance through the gambit of cultural and political organising, demonstrated most recently in the co-authored book Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan (Bloomsbury, 2019), which highlights the porous boundaries of shrine worship compared to the rigid boundaries of religious identity.