Land of Lime

Back in a cold Chicago from sunny and warm northern California. Well, it was cold and raining in San Francisco too. Sepoy and I complained about the weather much but soon after landing in Chicago, we realized there is cold weather and then there is cold weather.

As I was busy all of last week, I haven’t managed to post two more entries on Hariscandra, which I will do soon. The South Asia conference at the University of California, Berkeley was ostensibly the reason for us, the inhabitants of colder regions to escape to the more temperate climes of San Francisco. The Berkeley conference is much smaller and more intimate compared to the South Asia conference at Madison, although as towns both Madison and Berkeley are enjoyable. Anyways, common to both are some good panels, company of friends (old and new) and post panel celebrations. Although I couldn’t go to this panel on saturday morning, it was extremely gratifying to see a full panel on Dalit literature entitled ‘Defiance and Disillusion: Narrative Strategies in Contemporary Dalit Literature’. I did have a long conversation with one of the panelists, Laura R. Brueck and I eagerly look forward to this new body of work on Dalit literature.

Yet after listening to many papers / panels and talking to friends at length about our work, I am still thinking about two things. What is the goal of these conferences both for individual participants and for institutions? I know the conventional ones. To present our work and get feedback from elders and colleagues; to have informal conversations with fellow participants and find potential collaborators; professional networking. There are some more which aren’t appropriate for a ‘family’ blog such as this. But I also think it would be worthwhile if the participants (including myself) were to take these events more serioulsy and at least make sure the panelists would have worked together closely to achieve a thematic or analytical (hopefully both) coherence. These days, technology makes it easy for panelists to adopt a WIKI approach or use Writeboard to initiate a conversation amongst themselves, exchange sections and drafts of their papers. Now, once the abstracts are written and panel proposal is sent, the only conversation that seems to happen is to arrange a post-panel celebration. I believe we need to be more demanding of ourselves and offer more to the audience, than racing through our 12 pages of text in twenty minutes. Yes, we all have too many demands on our time but our responsibility is to make sure we do adequate preparation as a group and ensure a panel is a panel.

Secondly, what is an appropriate theme or talk to give on these occasions, given the twenty minute time limit for each presentation? What kind of questions can be asked in these twenty minute talks, given that the audience (and quite often even the discussant) would not have read the papers beforehand or may not have known much about the texts? Of course, panelists too would not have any idea about the audience. Then, how should we approach our esoteric themes, texts and questions? This is the most difficult part of presenting at conferences. We often forget that the written thirty page essay or its ten page presentation version are both written documents and while one could effectively read (present?) that written document, an oral presentation ought to have a different rhythm and perhaps even (rhetorical?) structure to reach an audience. I usually fiddle until the last moment, trying to arrive at a framing idea or a proposition to present my theme but it is challenging.

As the Chicago graduate student conference approaches, we need to think more on these questions.

Speaking of California, read this open letter by Vinay Lal on the history text book controversy. I have been meaning to write on history and the anxieties of Hindus in light of California history text book case but that’s for later this week. Now I am back home, I will write more and post regularly.