Martin Segal Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center

In February 2013, Bangladesh became witness to a spontaneous protest which erupted in the Shahbag neighborhood of the capital city Dhaka. The protestors were demanding the death penalty for alleged war criminals who had assisted the Pakistan army in murders and rapes during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. The scale of the protest, the overwhelming presence of young people in the crowds, the large presence of women at overnight sit-ins, and the role of digital media in organizing the protests all heralded the arrival of “something new.” The spread of Shahbag movement throughout Bangladesh and among the diaspora signaled that a significant portion of Bangladeshis are dissatisfied with the current conception of a fair trial.

But did Shahbag’s demands also unleash an equally determined opposition? A reactionary movement to Shahbag has formed with two allied political parties– the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Jamaat-e-Islami. The Jamaat is a crucial factor here, as some of their leaders are facing trials for alleged war crimes during the 1971 war. In the last few weeks, the country has experienced strikes, particularly violence between reactionary and state forces.

These conflicts have spurred concern among Bangladeshis and people around the world, and have brought out many political questions that require theoretical and political responses. This event will seek to provide a platform for analysis of the present political crises facing Bangladesh, by bringing together people from across the United States and Bangladesh who are academics, political commentators, activists, and students, for a discussion and dialogue with the audience. We hope this discussion will help unravel the various dimensions of Shahbag in all its complexity: conflicting memories of the past, questions of rights and judiciary, contesting claims of nationalism, the crisis of the present, and the uncertain future.

Speakers:

Hasan Ferdous is a columnist for the daily Prothom Alo, Bangladesh’s largest circulating newspaper.  Previously he worked in Bangladesh for various publications, including Daily Sangbad, Weekly Sachitra Sandhani and Weekly Dhaka Courier.  He has published extensively in English, as well as in his native Bengali. His works include six volumes of essays on literature and aesthetics, a collection of essays on Bangladesh’s liberation war and a collection of poems. His latest publication, Rabindranath, Gitanjali o dui Harriet, was published in 2011 as a tribute to the Nobel Laureate’s 150th anniversary of birth.  Currently he lives in New York and works for an international organization.

Dr. Azfar Hussain is an Associate Professor of Liberal Studies/Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, while he has also taught English and World Literature, Ethnic Studies, and Cultural Studies at Washington State University, Bowling Green State University, and Oklahoma State University. In Bangladesh, he worked as a magazine editor, a member of a national-level left activist alliance, and as a university teacher of English before he came to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship. Azfar Hussain has published—in both English and Bengali—numerous academic and creative pieces, including translations from several non-western languages. Interested in theory in the largest sense—while believing that politics, poetics, and praxis need to be organically orchestrated together in the service of radical social change—Hussain has written on a range of topics from Native American poetics and politics to Marxist political economy to third-world literatures. Hussain is the author of The World in Question: Essays in Political Economy and Cultural Politics (Dhaka: Samhati Publications), while he has co-edited the two-volume reader Reading About the World (New York: Hartcourt Brace).

Naeem Mohaiemen researches histories of the international left, and the contradictions of borders, wars, and belonging, through essays, photography, and film. His museum projects have been described as “not yet disillusioned fully with the capacity of human society” (Vijay Prashad, Take on Art). Naeem was the lead critic of Sarmila Bose’s revisionist history of the Bangladesh independence war, in the essay “Flying Blind: Waiting for a real reckoning on 1971″ (Economic & Political Weekly). He edited the anthology Chittagong Hill Tracts in the blind spot of Bangladesh nationalism (Drishtipat/Manusher Jonno Foundation). Naeem is a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at Columbia University.

Nayma Qayum is a Political Science Ph.D. candidate at CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include political institutions in transitional and developing countries, and her dissertation topic is “Engaging bad governments: Informal Institutions and Political Participation in Bangladesh.” She was a researcher for the UN Team supporting the transitional process in Iraq from 2004-2006, a Research Fellow at BRAC in Bangladesh from 2009-2001, and a contributor at WorldPolicy.org. She is a member of the Organizing Collective of South Asia Solidarity Initiative and has been an Adjunct Lecturer at City College, CUNY, and Rutgers University.

Dr. Tazreena Sajjad currently serves as Professorial Lecturer in the Department of International Politics in the School of International Service (SIS) at American University in Washington D.C. Her specialization includes human rights and conflict, justice and reconciliation in the aftermath of war, humanitarian interventions in violent conflicts, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of combatants (DDR), and the role and experiences of women as combatants, peacemakers and peacebuilders in war and its aftermath. Her publications include her book Transitional Justice in South Asia: A Study of Afghanistan and Nepal” (forthcoming), These Spaces in Between: The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) and its Work on Transitional Justice, and Human Rights and Human Insecurity: The Contributions of US Counter-Terrorism (co-authored with Julie Mertus). Her publications have also appeared in Exploring International Human Rights, Subcontracting Peace: The Challenges of NGO Peacebuilding, International Human Rights Post 9/11, Women and Wars, and Rape: Instrument of War and Genocide. Dr. Sajjad is also the author of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit report Peace At All Costs? Reintegration and Reconciliation in Afghanistan. Prior to joining AU, Dr. Sajjad worked in Global Rights’ Afghanistan program and in the National Democratic Institute (NDI)

Ahmed Shamim is pursuing a Ph.D. in Linguistic at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests include linguistic nationalism, language policies and ideologies, endangered language documentation, and the descriptive grammar of Bangla.  A collection of his essays on Bengali language was published in 2013 under the title of Bangla Kotha by Bhasha Chitra, Bangladesh.  He was one of the organizers of the Bangladeshi leftist alliance Protirodh Parba.  Mr. Shamim holds an MA in English literature from Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh and an MA in Linguistic form CUNY Graduate Center.  He has taught a range of courses, including linguistics, Bangla language, and English literature at several universities in Bangladesh.  He has been teaching linguistics at CUNY LaGuardia Community College, Bangla languages at the South Asian Summer Language Institute, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Nazmul Sultan is a student of Philosophy and Political Theory at CUNY Baccalaureate Program.  His philosophical interests lie in exploring the concept of the political, while he is also working on topics such as theory of sovereignty in the context of late capitalist political formation and the way it relates to emerging borders and their attendant violence, politics of civil society, and the concept of politics-as-a-way-of-life. He has published articles on the Shahbag Movement, on the logic of violence at Indo-Bangla border, and on the problematic of civil society oriented politics in Bangladesh. He’s been a regular contributor to the Bengali weekly Shorbojon, a bulletin that played an instrumental role in giving expression to the radical kernel of the Shahbag Movement. Sultan is a co-editor of the forthcoming academic journal in Bengali, Itihashjan.

Moderator:

Humayun Kabir is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at CUNY Graduate Center.  He is interested combining Comparative Politics and Political Theory frames in studying post-colonial societies.  His dissertation topic is “Thoughts of Becoming: Negotiating Modernity and Identity in Bangladesh.”  He is also a blogger at AlalODulal.org and a member of the Organizing Collective of South Asia Solidarity Initiative. He has been an Adjunct Lecturer of Political Science at Baruch College, York College, and FIT.

Understanding Shahbag: Bangladesh at a Crossroads
Date: Thursday, May 2, 2013
Time: 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Location: Martin E. Segal Theatre

Sanctions as a Tool of War: A Comparative Look at Iraq and Iran
Date: Monday, April 29, 2013
Time: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Location: Skylight Conference Room, 9th Floor

The Graduate Center, CUNY. Free and open to the public.

How can urban social movements cohere with existing institutions of power, from unions to local government? As importantly, how can movements collaborate with each other to achieve broader, systemic changes? Can these movements and political projects realistically be anti-capitalist? Activists and leaders Bill Fletcher, Jon Liss, and Gihan Perera will discuss these issues in an open forum.

BILL FLETCHER, JR. is the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; an editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941″; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of “Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice“; and the author of “‘They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions.” Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web. www.billfletcherjr.com

JON LISS has organized for racial and social justice in Virginia for the last 30 years. Between 1979-1981, he organized for the creation of an African American Studies department as a student at the University of Virginia. He graduated with a B.A. in History in 1981, and continued his organizing for US divestment in the South African Apartheid regime. From 1983-1984, he served as an elected leader of a taxi drivers association. In 1986, Jon co-founded Tenants and Workers United (TWU), a low-income racial and gender justice organization based in the Arlandria-Chirilagua neighborhood. Jon served as the Executive Director of TWU until 2011. In 2007 he co-founded Virginia New Majority and currently serves as both a board member and as the organization’s Executive Director.

GIHAN PERERA is co-founder and former Executive Director of the Miami Workers Center, a community organizing institution for low-income Black and Latino communities in South Florida. His decade-plus leadership of the center helped turn it into a national peer anchor to a number of strategic initiatives including the US Social Forum, the Right to the City Alliance, and a number of other efforts to build the theory, practice and capacity of work happening at the intersection of race, gender, the economy and the environment. He is currently the Executive Director of the Florida New Majority, a statewide civil rights and civic engagement organization that is working to connect and empower Florida’s diverse communities.

Moderated by David Harvey, Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics.

How to Organize a City: Bill Fletcher, Jon Liss, and Gihan Perera in conversation
Date: Thursday, April 25, 2013
Time: 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Location: Elebash Recital Hall

In April 1970, an essay titled “Social Processes and Spatial Form:  An Analysis of the Conceptual Problems of Urban Planning,” was published in volume 25 of the journal Papers of the Regional Science Association. For this first time, this essay constructed an unexplored critique of urban disciplines vis-á-vis capitalism. The result created a dialectical theoretical framework, and forever changed the way many urban practitioners viewed their disciplinary tools and formal training. Ultimately, this heralded an ongoing formation of radically new and unseen forms of urban practice. In 1973, this essay became the first chapter of Social Justice and the City. David Harvey’s seminal second book split the way our cities are read, and created entirely new research paths for his contemporaries and younger practitioners.

Forty years after its publication, Social Justice and the City is as relevant as when it was first conceived. As the processes of urbanization fall faster than ever at the control of the elites, an unprecedented wave of enforced spatial segregation radically alters our urban realities. Today, Social Justice and the City provokes views and directions that remain at the core of any imaginary for resistance, and an action towards the belief that socially just forms of urbanization are possible.

The 40 year commemoration of Social Justice and the City will pay tribute to the lasting work and influence of David Harvey. The day will be introduced by Harvey, who will share his views on the book and its 40 year trajectory. Harvey will then be joined by a diverse array of urban practitioners, from artists to academics and designers, whose practice has been transformed by Social Justice and the City.

Participants Include:  David Harvey, Sharon Zukin, Don Mitchell, Andy Merrifield, Margit Mayer, Peter Marcuse, Ayreen Anastas, Martha Rosler, Miguel Robels-Durán, Rene Gabri, William Moorish, Andrew Ross, Jeanne van Heeswijk, William Tabb, John Krinsky, Teddy Cruz, Erik Swyngedouw, Nik Heynen, Neil Brenner, Melissa Wright, Tom Angotti, Linda McDowell, Miriam Greenberg, Richard Walker and others.

RSVP & Information:  urban.parsons.edu

Media Contact

Chris Chafin, The New School, 79 FIFTH AVENUE, 17TH FLOOR, NEW YORK, NY 10003. 212.229.5667 x3794,  twitter.com/Urban_Ecologies

Social Justice and the City: 40th Anniversary Celebration
Date: Saturday, May 4, 2013
Time: 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
Location: The New School

Narrating Labor Struggles: Storytelling
Date: Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Time: 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Location: Room C197, CUNY Graduate Center

 

Ashanti Alston: Prefigurative politics, autonomous zones, anarchism and the Black Panthers
Date: Friday, April 19, 2013
Time: 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Location: Room 6112

April 23, 2013 from 6.30 – 8.30 pm, Room 9204/9205

Frantz Fanon’s work is so significant to us today because it continues to give us an entirely different philosophical perspective on the ethical and political significance of a new way of being human together. Fanon both rejects traditional European narratives of why humans are unique and deserving of dignity and those anti- or post-humanists who argue that we are already beyond the human, either through evolution or in a political and ethical sense. To put it simply: the colonial situation is one of systematic dehumanization. The human, however, is not a set of attributes, whether real or ideal. Instead, what it means to be human together in a world beyond the terrifying brutalities of colonialism is only to be found in the revolutionary struggle itself.” (Drucilla Cornell)

Discussants: David Harvey, Peter Hitchcock, and Kyoo Lee

DRUCILLA CORNELL is Professor of Political Science, Women’s Studies and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. Prior to beginning her life as an academic, Cornell was a union organizer for a number of years. She worked for the UAW, the UE, and the IUE in California, New Jersey, and New York. She is the author of Defending Ideals: War, Democracy, and Political Struggles (2004) andMoral Images of Freedom: A Future for Critical Theory (2007), among other books.

The African Spring: Frantz Fanon Today and the Legacy of Revolutionary Humanism
Date: Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Time: 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Location: Room 9204

2012 Neuffer Fellow, International Women’s Media Foundation

Monday, April 22, 2013 at 7 pm in Room 5414 at the CUNY Graduate Center

 RSVP: events@aidnyc.org

While India is perceived as an emerging market, the stories of the plundering of natural resources and the systematic annihilation of the indigenous people go unheard. In this race to make India a superpower, and a growing media industry that champions this idea, social inequality has reached its zenith, and easily gets pushed aside. What, then, is the future of the people who grow food with their hands; who have long been guarding forests and rivers – even before climate change could touch them? Why does the media shy away from reporting about the majority of its populace, even while they silently die from landmines and malaria alike? Reporting on the ‘hidden civil war in India,’ Priyanka Borpujari, an independent journalist based in Mumbai, reports and photographs from those territories of mineral-rich India which are only silenced.

About Priyanka Borpujari:

Priyanka Borpujari is an independent journalist based in Mumbai, India. She has been documenting human rights abuses in her country, on account of the plundering of natural resources towards the goal of making India an emerging market. Her work takes her to dark territories of a mineral-rich India, which is rife with violence and disease. While she has been writing for various publications in India, she has also been reporting through her blog posts about India’s mad race for development and the adverse effects it has had on the indigenous populace. In 2011, she was awarded the ‘Young Independent Journalist Fellowship’ by the New York-based SINGH Foundation. Most recently, she was selected as the 2012 International Women’s Media Foundation Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow and is currently based at MIT. Along with Adharshila Learning Centre – a unique school in western India for indigenous children and based on the principle of ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ – she has been bringing out a magazine to amplify the indigenous voices. Her blog is www.priyanka-borpujari.blogspot.com.

Co-Sponsors:

South Asian Journalists’ Association

South Asian Bar Association of New York

Association for India’s Development NYC

official website : www.aidnyc.org Discussion forum: www.aidnycforum.org

The Human Cost of Development: India
Date: Monday, April 22, 2013
Time: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Location: Room 5414

Tuesday, April 16th, 2013 from 6.30 – 8.30 pm

Room 5307, CUNY Graduate Center

Free and open to the public

This presentation will discuss long-forgotten conditions of uneven geographical development in the context of the current financial and debt crisis in the Eurozone. The dominant explanations of the crisis are mainly macro-economic and financial but, Professor Hadjimichalis will argue for its geographical components/foundations. After a short descriptive comment about the current debt crisis in the Eurozone and particularly in Southern Europe as part of the wider global crisis, an alternative interpretation is provided based on uneven geographical/regional development among Euro-regions especially after the introduction of the euro. He will also discuss radical alternatives to euro since 2009 with the rise of many grassroots initiatives at different scales in Southern Europe and Greece in particular.

Costis Hadjimichalis is professor Emeritus of Economic Geography and Regional Development at the Department of Geography, Harokopio University Athens. He had previous post at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and was visiting professor at Roskilde University (Denmark), UCLA, Berkely (USA), Oslo (Norway), NIRSA (Ireland) and Macquire University (Australia). His research concerns uneven geographical development and socio-spatial justice in the Eurozone, the social and spatial effects of economic crisis in Southern Europe, the role of small firms in local development and a radical interpretation of landscapes as part of everyday life. He is section editor for Regional Development in the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Elsevier), managing editor of Geographies (a Greek journal) and member of editorial board in several other international journals. His recent books (all in Greek) include: Contemporary Greek Landscapes (editor, 2011), Athens: Melissa, Space in Radical Thinking (co-authored with D. Vaiou, 2012), Athens: Nissos/N. Poulantzas Institute, and Geographies of Capitalist Crisis and Uneven Development, (forthcoming, 2013), Kritiki: Athens.

Uneven Geographical Development and the Euro Crisis
Date: Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Time: 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Location: Room 5307, CUNY Graduate Center

The Grammar of Violence: Writing South African Crime as Fiction (A Writer’s Perspective)
Date: Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Time: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Location: Room 9206 and 9207, CUNY Graduate Center