Concourse: ideas

Saturday, January 6, 2024

Call For Publications: Terms of Engagement: Social Formations, Resistances and the Nation in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century India . Ed. Utsa Ray & Samarpita Mitra

In this volume of essays we are inviting articles from young scholars whose research explores myriad possibilities of ‘writing social history’ from fresh theoretical perspectives and using innovative archival resources. We propose to include essays that look at quotidian rituals of law making, morality, and discipline through various possibilities; the subversive practices implicit in oral comic stories how the colonial state tried to impose order on market spaces where the colonizer and the colonized met in their day-to-day encounters. The purpose of this volume is not to offer a wholly new / revisionist approach to social history. Rather, drawing from the rich inheritance of South Asia’s historiographic traditions, we will collate essays that will delineate the histories of things, spaces, ideas and representations, weaving together their materiality and discursivities. The ‘social’ in ‘social history’, we propose can never be adequately addressed by retaining the earlier dualisms between the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’ or the ‘social’ and the ‘political’. Rather,the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’ are both intrinsic to the material world, the quotidian lives of collectives as well as to the operation of power. In a way therefore, this volume will attempt to bring together apparently disparate essays to foreground a complex web of interrelatedness that constitute the totality called the ‘social’. The ‘social’ here is then a site of historical change where earlier formations of power, ideas, agencies, identities and so on interact to produce new ones.