“Knowledge is not Territory: Episodes from the Archive for Early Colonial India” with Shahzad Bashir

UNC Department of Religious Studies and the  Modern Indian Studies Initiative invite you to a talk by:

Dr. Shahzad Bashir

Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities

Brown University 

“Knowledge is not Territory: Episodes from the Archive for Early Colonial India”

In the wake of historiographical movements such as Postcolonial and Subaltern studies, we are used to thinking that European colonial expansion from the early modern period onward entailed a simultaneous and inexorable worldwide domination of European knowledge systems. Utilizing materials produced in India circa 1780-1850, I suggest that, for the colonial period, we should separate the history of knowledge from that of control over territory. This requires reading the colonial archive anew, concentrating equally on empirical work and a rethinking of concepts we use to correlate between ideas and political circumstances. An evaluation of the past in this vein has implications for how we imagine our futures today, academically and otherwise.

Wednesday, September 27^th, 3:30pm-5:00pm, Murphey Hall 202

For more information contact Tracey Cave (tcave@email.unc.edu)