March 19th, 2013 7:30 PM at The Brecht Forum, 451 West Street www.brechtforum.org

11 years after the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat state of Western India in February 2002, controversial Chief Minister of Gujarat from the Bhartiya Janata Party, Narendra Modi is being mooted by some sections as BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate for the 2014 General Elections in India. Implicated in several reports, Modi continues to shun responsibility and gloss over the carnage of 2002 with claims of Gujarat’s development, protecting perpetrators with impunity. Join the panelists as they discuss issues of state culpability, the divisive communal politics of the Hindu-right and the Hindu-right’s continual attempts to obscure their agenda of violent injustice.

In Ghosts of Revolution (2011), Shalah Talebi’s haunting account of her years as a political prisoner in Iran, she engages two interrelated premises put forth by Walter Benjamin: that telling stories of lived experiences opens the possibility of a true human connection, the transmission of wisdom, and individual and social transformation; and, to paraphrase Benjamin, that death sanctions everything the storyteller can tell, for the storyteller borrows her authority from death.

Please join us as we celebrate publications by fellows and board members of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics: John Arena, Ashley Dawson, Jonathan Gray, Kyoo Lee, and Ida Susser

Sustaining Activism combines analysis of a successful rural women’s movement at a key moment in the development of Brazil’s democracy with examination of the father-daughter ethnographic methodology developed by Rubin and his daughter to study, write, and teach about the movement.

Documentary Film Screening and Discussion. Monday March 4, 2013 from 4.15 – 6.15 pm, Rooms 9204/ 9205, CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to the public; no reservations required.

This lecture examines the politics of colonial difference in the United States by focusing on two historically distinct episodes addressed to the divide between foreign and domestic in the constitution and contestation of US settler sovereignty.

Under the canvas of the “War on Terror”, the postcolonial themes of violent and hotly contested religio-nationalism have been revisited in Pakistan over the last decade. These have had direct and specific implications for women and minorities. This discussion by Afiya Shehrbano Zia traces the backlash against the liberal and/or secular women’s movement as betrayers of the Muslim (male) cause. It will also discuss the misguided prescription of those academic and developmental projects that advocate the instrumentalisation of Islam as an appropriate and ‘authentic’ approach in Muslim contexts.