What Ruins Reveal: Professor Sadia Abbas on Empire, Memory & South Asia скачать в хорошем качестве

What Ruins Reveal: Professor Sadia Abbas on Empire, Memory & South Asia

Why are there so many ruins across India, Pakistan, and South Asia? What do these broken buildings and forgotten places really tell us? In this powerful talk given at the South Asian Institute at SOAS (UK), author and professor Sadia Abbas explains how ruins are not just old structures — they hold deep stories about colonialism, empire, Partition, and lost memories. From Delhi to Karachi, these ruins still shape how we live, what we forget, and what we’re told to remember. 👉 If you’re interested in South Asian history, British colonial rule, Partition, postcolonial identity, or cultural heritage, this talk is for you. 💬 Chapters: 00:00 A Personal Beginning: Taj Abbas Azad & the Postcolonial State 2:36 Taxila Revisited: Ahmed Ali Manganhar’s Spectral Paintings 6:44 The Ruin as Specter: Colonial Aesthetics and National Identity 10:48 The Claimants and The Fading Feast: Power, Nostalgia, and the Archive 15:55 From Kipling to Curzon: Colonial Desire and Ruin Logic 33:42 The Architecture of Power: Fergusson, Curzon, and the Racialization of History 45:00 Manganhar’s Sindhi Lens: Regional Resistance and Postcolonial Possibilities Sadia Abbas grew up in Karachi and Singapore, lives in New York and spends all the time she can in Siena, Lesbos and London. She has served as director of the Center for European Studies at Rutgers-New Brunswick and associate professor of postcolonial studies at Rutgers University-Newark. She is Humanities and Education Advisor for the Climate Action Center Karachi. She is the author of At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament, winner of the MLA first book award, and the novel The Empty Room, shortlisted for the DSC prize for South Asian Literature, and co-editor (with Jan Howard of the RISD museum) of Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities, which was listed as one the best art books of 2021 by the New York Times. She has written numerous essays on subjects including Jesuit poetics and Catholic martyrdom in Early Modern English poetry, neoliberalism and the Greek debt crisis, Pakistani art, the uses of Reformation in contemporary Muslim thought, and Jewish converts to Islam and treatments of subjectivity in contemporary theorizations of Muslim female agency. She has also written essays and opinion pieces for Dawn and Daily Times (the Pakistani dailies), Naya Daur, OpenDemocracy, CommonDreams and TANK magazine. She is currently completing, Revenant Ruin: Origins, Revival and the Management of Life, a book about ruin discourse in India, Greece and the Americas and its role in the production and control of racial, religious and ethnic identities and the creation of borders across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Her current interests include, the global rise of the far right, European policy, migration and the idea of Europe. #SadiaAbbas #SouthAsianHistory #Colonialism #Partition #PakistanHistory #IndiaHistory #CulturalHeritage #Postcolonial #Ruins #Empire #Decolonization #BritishRaj #MughalEmpire #Kashmir #Subcontinent #Identity #Nationalism #History #SouthAsia #Independence #FreedomStruggle #HeritageConservation #Imperialism #BritishIndia #PakistanStudies #IndianHistory #ColonialLegacy #FreedomMovement #CulturalIdentity #HistoricalPreservation #newwavehistory