The GLASS series will bring to Leiden University prominent scholars working in fields associated with Asian studies, whose work has had or has the potential to have an impact across disciplinary, regional and national boundaries within Asia and beyond.  Thus, at one level, the “global” in the title of the series is meant to reflect this aspect of scholarship and knowledge production from various fields comprising Asian studies.  At another level, it is meant to critically consider the question of “globalization,” historically and in its contemporary configurations through particular locations (not just in the geographically bounded sense) and experiences of Asia.  Such a critical consideration may ask how Asia is itself a global formation while at the same time participating in the globalization of multiple aspects of human experience. Topics may include competing conceptions and categories of modernity and tradition, the changing shape of political communities, state-society formations and urban-rural relationships; modes of domination and resistance; forms and practices of identification; routes, patterns and hierarchies of economic and cultural production, exchange, dissemination, circulation and consumption; artistic practices, cultural institutions and media technologies; emergent social, political, ecological, and aesthetic movements; and histories of human migration and its effects.  Through these two lenses, engaging the ‘global’ from the perspective of Asia and Asian studies, this series seeks to bring together the concerns of the AMT and LGI research profiles.

GLASS website: www.glass.leiden.edu

We are delighted to announce that the first GLASS Visiting Scholar will be Engseng Ho, Professor of Anthropology from Duke University. After graduating from Stanford with undergraduate degrees in economics and anthropology, Professor Ho spent a few years as an international economist in Singapore before pursuing a masters and PhD at the University of Chicago. There he regularly met with multiple mentors in anthropology, Arabic and Islamic studies. His dissertation on a society of Yemeni people that had a 500-year history of migration broke the mold of a traditional anthropology program that focuses on the study of contemporary society in one geographic locality.

Professor Ho spent two years in Yemen conducting research that revealed a rich history of a people who traveled throughout East Africa, the Arab world, India and Southeast Asia, intermarrying and contributing to the establishment of new Muslim religious, political and legal institutions. The dissertation grew into a book: The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, published by the University of California Press in 2006.

Mrinalini Sinha is Alice Freeman Palmer Professor in the Department of History and Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature (by courtesy) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has written on various aspects of the political history of colonial India, with a focus on anti-colonialism, gender, and transnational approaches. She has written numerous works including the books: Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (2006) and Colonial Masculinity: The 'manly Englishman' and the 'effeminate Bengali' in the late nineteenth century (1995). She has recently become interested in the different forms of political imaginings, beyond the nation-state, that animated anti-colonial thought in India at least until the interwar period. Currently, she is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation 2012 Fellow in the Humanities. Her Guggenheim project, with the title “Complete Political Independence: The Curious History of a Nationalist Indian Demand,” will explore the contingency of the development of the nation-state form in India.

Professor Sinha will join us from April 23-25, 2013.

Her book, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire is available on reserve at the O.L.G. of the Main Library.

Description
Specters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an exposé written by the American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country’s child wives. According to Mayo, the roots of the social problems she chronicled lay in an irredeemable Hindu culture that rendered India unfit for political self-government. Mother India was reprinted many times in the United States, Great Britain, and India; it was translated into more than a dozen languages; and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents.

Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India, from the book’s publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book’s facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India’s social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.