2024. Sept 13. 10:15AM-12:15PM, Cantor Center (36 E. 8th St.), Rm. 102.
Presentation: “Globalization, Religion, and Ethnonationalism”
This presentation is part of a research project in the NYU Global Asia Program on Troubled National Territories. Over many centuries, mobile imperial powers and settlers produced mobile territories where fixed borders of national sovereignty were imposed. This produced numerous troubled national territories where conflicts persist in old imperial frontiers, where national states impose their will by force in the name of national identity, unity, and security. We have been studying areas all across Asia where troubled post-colonial states have used violence against people inside their borders to pursue national unity and security inside the global legal framework of national sovereignty. Each case is unique, with its own history and meanings, but when seen together they reveal features of national territory that enrich understandings of Asia’s globalization.
My presentation briefly mentions post-colonial French and Dutch territories (Algeria, Vietnam, and Indonesia), but focuses on territories in the former British Empire (mentioning Malaysia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Israel), and I concentrate on India, where the relationship of recent economic globalization and the rise of religious ethnonationalism is particularly pronounced and well studied.
I will discuss (1) Historical processes that generate and sustain religious ethnonationalism, (2) the globalization of national politics, where “diaspora” is only one among many avenues, (3) current ethnonationalist mobilization techniques, and (4) the inflection of American politics in 2024 by the globalization of religious ethnonationalism.
Headlines to read:
“How the Babri mosque destruction shaped India”
BBC. 5 December 2017
“Death threats sent to participants of US conference on Hindu nationalism,” The Guardian, 9 Sept 2021
“Modi Calls Muslims ‘Infiltrators’ Who Would Take India’s Wealth.” NYTimes 22 April, 2024
“Modi Concedes Defeat in Ayodhya” Reuters 4 June 2024. Al Jazeera Indian Election 2024 coverage. Spring 2024 Election Results Graphic
Scholarship to read:
Mathias Le Bossé, “Ethnonationalism” in Oxford Bibliographies: Geography
Nora Fisher-Onar and Ahmet Erdi Ozgturk, “An Emerging Paradigm: Ethno-Religious Nationalism in an Age of Anxiety” LSE
Rebecca de Souza, “Hindutva and Ethnonationalism in the Indian American Diaspora,” Oxford Online Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. (PDF 23pp)
“From Savarkar to Golwalkar, why Hindutva admires Zionism,”Indian Express, by Christophe Jaffrelot , Kalrav Joshi.
Writing assignment: How has religion served nationalist movements?
Other reference.
Azad Essa and Linah Alsaafin, Hostile Homelands : The New Alliance Between India and Israel, Pluto Press, 2023. [requires NYU ID via Bobst], Chapter Two: “A Tale of Two Partitions,” pp. 13-23, and ” Chapter 4. “The Indian4 Diaspora and the Israeli Lobby in the United States,” pp. 73-96
“The Problem with Defining Antisemitism: Kenneth Stern helped write a definition now endorsed by more than forty countries. Why does he believe it’s causing harm?” By Eyal Press, The New Yorker, March 13, 202Ilan Pappe,
“Modern Palestine,” in the Oxford University Press Online Research Encyclopedia of Asian History
Zachary Lockman, “Exclusion and Solidarity: Labor Zionism and the and Arab Workers in Palestine, 1897-1929,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, edited by Gyan Prakash, Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 211-240.
2023, Sept 13
This is a file of material for my lecture on September 13, 2023 at the NYU History Course, “History in the Headlines,” plus additional material for the study of global Hindutva and its current dominance in India.
1. Title for the presentation: “Modi’s India: What’s in the News and Not”
“India’s slow-burn affair with Israel heats up,” by Rohan Venkat, Himal Southasia, 1 Dec 2023.
“‘India Is on the Moon’: Lander’s Success Moves Nation to Next Space Chapter,” New York Times, 23 Aug 2023.
“India’s Kashmir clampdown continues four years after Article 370 abrogated,” Al Jazeera, 5 Aug 2023
“India’s Modi faces a no-confidence vote over silence on ethnic violence tearing at remote Manipur,” AP News, 7 Aug 2023
News/Opinion Pieces:
“Narendra Modi is the world’s most popular leader,” The Economist, June 15, 2023.
Ramachandra Guha, “The Cult of Modi,”Foreign Policy, April 11, 2022.
Arudhati Roy, “The Illusion of a U.S.-India Partnership,” New York Times, July 13, 2023
Debashish Roy Chowdhury, “India is on the Brink,” New York Times, August 10, 2023.
3. Context.
David Ludden, Making India Hindu: Community, Conflict, and the Politics of Democracy. Preface to the Second Edition, OneWorld Publishers, 2005, 10pp.
Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi’s India : Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2021, PART 1, pp. 1-30, 148-154.
Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiya, “Despite Modi, India Has Not Yet Become a Hindu Authoritarian State,” Cato Institute (2020). (PDF online) 21pp
Rebecca de Souza, “Hindutva and Ethnonationalism in the Indian American Diaspora,” Oxford Online Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. (PDF 23pp)
Reference:
“The Nazification of India,” Justice for All report April 2023.
“When the state Bombs its own people,” CounterCurrents.org April 2023.
on the formation of India’s imperial Hindu Bharat:
- “The Decline of Buddhism and militant Hindu Territorial Hegemony, circa 950-1250.
- An Agrarian History of South Asia, pp.69-96
- India and South Asia: A Short History, pp.228-269.
- Making India Hindu.
Hindutva study resources: Hindutva archive.
Weaponizing Hinduism video … with Babri Masjid footage.
Partition: a popular history, William Dalrymple, The New Yorker, 2015
My Presentation: GoogleSlides.