Guest Speakers
Anand A. Yang, Tamaki Professor, International Studies and History, is the former Director of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of books on The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India and Bazaar India: Peasants, Traders, Markets and the Colonial State; and the editor of volumes on Crime and Criminality in British India and Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History. His forthcoming books are on Empire of Convicts and Thirteen Months in China, a co-translated work. A former editor of The Journal of Asian Studies and Peasant Studies, Yang was the former president of the Association for Asian Studies and of the World History Association.
Abstract: My talk, entitled “’China Beyond the Seas’: Indian Images of Chin in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” highlights the long-standing ties between India and China but also the surprising gaps in knowledge about one another during the colonial period, in part because of the distortions wrought by colonial and imperial rule across Asia.
Krishnendu Ray is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health. He taught at the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, New York before coming to NYU in 2006. He is the author of The Migrant’s Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households (2004), and the co-editor of Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (2012). His forthcoming book titled Ethnic Restaurateur and the American City will be published by Bloomsbury in 2016.
Abstract: This presentation is about the enticing, perhaps even addictive, but disreputable flavors of the street—salty, sour, pungent, even sulphuric—that reside inchuran, aloo-dum, dahi-vada and puchka. That is where desire wells, centered on objects of affection in a network of social affiliation and antagonism. It is the source of dread and delight for modern Indian middle classes indoctrinated to avoid and infantilize these tastes, yet unable to shake them. Memories of the street haunt the parlors of the upwardly mobile. The puchkawala occupies the lowest of lowly spaces of commensality, even below the tea-stall, the paanwalas and the boiled-anda (egg) stand, because of the dual burden of impermanence and the feeding of illegitimate appetites. This then is a reflection on disreputable food and the migration of cooks and masalchis from the country to the city, interrogating the mutually constitutive connections between reputable and disreputable gastronomy, metropolitan city (Kolkata) and provincial town (Baleshwar), Bengal and Odisha. In this presentation I move through the nostalgia for a childhood palate, around the democratizing potential of street foods, to the dark possibilities of mob violence where a homosocial masculine public is produced and reproduced through gestures of inclusion and exclusion, nonetheless hinting towards productive popular disputations of taste.
China Remix
Synopsis: The city of Guangzhou is home to China’s largest community of African immigrants. This short documentary explores the city’s burgeoning African entertainment industry through the lives of three African hip-hop artists who are trying to find success in the face of China’s challenging labor and immigration laws. The film follows the entertainers as they prepare for their shows, perform, and live their daily lives with their Chinese and African family members and friends. Runtime: Approx. 29 min.
Dorian Carli-Jones is a New York-based independent filmmaker, holding a BFA in Film & 
Television Production from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Since graduation, Dorian has directed and produced various short and feature films, as well as episodics, instructionals, and music videos. China Remix represents Dorian’s first foray into documentary filmmaking. Dorian is currently in post-production on his latest short narrative film, Target Practice. doriancarli-jones.com
Melissa Lefkowitz holds a B.A. in Literature and East Asian Studies from New York University and an A.M. in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, where her research encompassed the regions of China and Sub-Saharan Africa and focused on the visual representation of Africans in Chinese mass media. Her current research interests center on China’s expanding presence in Africa, specifically how China is becoming “matter-of-fact” on the continent. In the fall, she will matriculate into NYU’s doctoral program in sociocultural anthropology.
Respondent
James Pickett is the incoming Inter-Asia Postdoctoral Associate and currently a doctoral candidate in the history department at Princeton University, where he specializes in empire and Islamic authority. His dissertation explores transregional networks of Persianate exchange among religious scholars in Bukhara during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Related articles also trace the cultural memory of this era as a subsequent influence on Soviet propaganda in Iran and language ideology in Central Eurasia. His next project will compare Bukhara’s transformation into a Russian protectorate with the Indian princely state of Hyderabad’s parallel trajectory into semi-colonial status.
Organizing Committee
Heidi K. Lam is a third year PhD student in Anthropology at Yale University. heidi.lam@yale.edu
Tri Phuong is a third year PhD student in Anthropology at Yale University. tri.phuong@yale.edu
Alyssa Paredes is a second year PhD student in Anthropology at Yale University. alyssa.paredes@yale.edu
Courtney Sato is a second year PhD student in Anthropology at Yale University. courtney.sato@yale.edu