[Linganth] Panel on Bernard Bate's Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern

Fri Oct 15 12:23:36 UTC 2021

Dear colleagues,

I am writing to invite you to an online *Panel Discussion on Bernard Bate's
<https://www.sup.org/openebook/9781503628663/>**Protestant Textuality and
the Tamil Modern <https://www.sup.org/openebook/9781503628663/>*, taking
place *today*,  *Friday, October 15, 2021 - 5:00pm - 6:30pm CDT. *(An
open-access version of the book is available here:
https://www.sup.org/openebook/9781503628663/)

The virtual discussion will be led by editors of the book: E. Annamalai,
Francis Cody, Malarvizhi Jayanth, and Constantine V. Nakassis. The
conversation will be moderated by Susan Gal. In partnership
with the Seminary Co-op and the Center for the Study of Communication and
Society, The University of Chicago

REGISTER HERE
<https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqdu6urzsqEtDwLuIX416P5HXY-J75RFhs>
:
https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqdu6urzsqEtDwLuIX416P5HXY-J75RFhs

*About the book: *What are the lineages of mass democracy in South Asia?
What changed from the nineteenth into the twentieth century such that
people previously excluded from, or indifferent to, formal political action
suddenly appeared in great numbers in the political realm? And how did
political oratory, did speech itself, become central to this form of
politics? Bernard Bate’s Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern offers
a genealogy of this political transformation, of Tamil political oratory,
and of the emergence of vernacular political modernity in the
Tamil-speaking lands of India and Sri Lanka. It documents how sermonic and
homiletic genres introduced by Protestant missionaries in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries fused with culturally and historically deeper
forms and aesthetics of language, providing the communicative
infrastructure that eventually enabled a new kind of agent, the vernacular
politician, to address and mobilize a modern Tamil people within a
distinctive social imaginary. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil
Modern mobilizes materials from a variety of sources, ranging from
interviews, catechisms, Saivite polemics, Tamil poetry and biographies,
archival documents, and hitherto unexamined colonial police reports to
trace a genealogy of this transformation. Starting from the early
missionary attempts to address non-believers in the bazaars and culminating
in the florescence of nationalist politics, throughout, the analytic focus
on the politics and ethics of textuality: cultural and historical concepts
of what semiotic, communicative activity is and should be, can and should
do. This analytic focus forms the basis of the book’s major argument that
rhetoric and oratory—as embodied in real, dialogic, sensuous textual
practice—has infrastructural effects on the unfolding of history and the
structuring of social order. By demonstrating the emergence of political
modernity through a genealogy of Tamil political oratory, this book shows
how the vernacularizing process was both aesthetically singular to the
Tamil world—for all its newness, vernacular oratory tied language to older
and deeper cultural aesthetics, poetics, and lifeways—and exemplary of the
global emergence of new geographies and histories of political belonging of
modern peoples, nations, and publics.About the author: Bernard (“Barney”)
Bate(1960–2016) was Associate Professor and Head of Studies in the
Anthropology Department at Yale-NUS College. He taught at Yale University
for ten years before helping to shape the core social science and
humanities curriculum at his new institution in Singapore. A linguistic
anthropologist by training, Barney devoted his scholarly life to the study
of Tamil political oratory. His first book, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian
Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India (Columbia 2009) was based on
ethnographic research he conducted in Madurai, Tamil Nadu for his
dissertation at the University of Chicago (PhD 2000). It consists of a
study of the refined register of Tamil used in political oratory by leaders
of the Dravidian movement in the second half of the twentieth century.
Arguing that using this ancient sounding language in speech was in fact a
relatively recent development, the book examined political rallies to
understand how virtuosic speakers interpellated common people as democratic
subjects through literary Tamil’s poetic qualities. A mentor to generations
of linguistic anthropologists and students of Tamil, Barney’s teaching and
writing where both centrally concerned with what he called the “poesy” of
language: that palpable quality of speech that lends it world-making
capacities. His second major research project brought him to the archives
in both Chennai, Tamil Nadu and Jaffna, Sri Lanka in an effort understand
the origins of political speech in Tamil. In a series of articles in
published the Indian Economic and Social History Review and Comparative
Studies in Society and History, along with a book chapter in the volume
Ethical Life in South Asia, Barney explored how protestant missionary
efforts introduced a new kind of public address that fused with the
aesthetics of Tamil poetics to form modern political oratory in the early
twentieth century.Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political
Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia (Stanford 2021) represents
the culmination of this work, tracing the emergence of public speaking in
Tamil from its origins in missionization through its initial spread in the
Swadeshi movement and on to mobilizations led by some of the most prominent
anti-colonial nationalist leaders.

*About the editors:*
*E. Annamalai* (Visiting Professor Emeritus in the Department of South
Asian Languages & Civilizations) is a linguist trained in India (MA,
M.Litt, Tamil Literature –Annamalai University) and the United States (PhD,
Linguistics –The University of Chicago) specializing in Tamil grammar and
semantics. He served for over twenty years as Professor and Director of the
Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India, where he studied
indigenous languages, their documentation, and their use in education; the
use of language in society, especially in education; and the study of
language diversity and its consequences. He has always been interested in
social issues and cultural creativity and he found the study of language a
good prism for understanding both. Until last academic year, he taught
Tamil language and literature at the University of Chicago for eleven years
and before that for five years at Yale University alongside Bernard Bate.

*Francis* *Cody* is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Anthropology and the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto. His
research focuses on language, media, and politics in southern India. He
first brought these interests to bear on a study of citizenship, literacy,
and social movement politics in rural Tamil Nadu. This work was published
as The Light of Knowledge(Cornell 2013), co-winner of the 2014 Edward Sapir
Book Prize awarded by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. Cody’s more
recent research theorizes populism and transformations of political
publicity through Tamil and English news media. This work explores
questions of law, technology, and violence in claims to representing
popular sovereignty, the topic of a book manuscript tentatively titled The
News Event. Taken as a whole, his work contributes to the transdisciplinary
project of elaborating critical social theories of mass mediation and
politics in the postcolonial world.

*Malarvizhi Jayanth* is a historian of colonial South Asia. She is due to
begin postdoctoral research as the Research Fellow in Slavery and its
Impacts at King's College, Cambridge, AY2021–2022. She holds a Ph.D. in
South Asian Languages & Civilizations from the University of Chicago.

*Constantine V. Nakassis* is Associate Professor of Anthropology,
Affiliated Faculty in the Departments of Comparative Human Development and
Cinema & Media Studies, and Chair of the Committee on Southern Asian
Studies. Trained as a linguistic anthropologist, his research spans the
social aspects of the Tamil language, youth culture and mass media in South
India, film theory and semiotics. He is the author of the 2016
monograph, Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India (University
of Chicago Press) and is currently working on new book manuscript on the
cinema of Tamil Nadu, entitled Onscreen/Offscreen (University of Toronto
Press).He is the organizer of the Chicago Tamil Forum, an annual workshop
devoted to Tamil language and culture, for which Bernard Bate provided its
name, and of which he a regular and founding member, alongside E. Annamalai
and Francis Cody.

*About the moderator*:
*Susan Gal* is Mae & Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor of
Anthropology, Linguistics, and of Social Sciences in the College at the
University of Chicago. Her work has focused on the political economy of
language, including linguistic nationalism, language and gender, and
especially the rhetorical and symbolic aspects of political transformation
in contemporary eastern Europe and post socialism generally, as well on the
construction of gender and discourses of reproduction. She is a pioneer in
the field of linguistic anthropology, writing numerous seminal texts on
language ideology, politics, and discourse, most recently, with Judith
Irvine, Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life (2019,
Cambridge University Press).

Copies of the book are available at the Seminary Co-op’s website (
https://www.semcoop.com/protestant-textuality-and-tamil-modern-political-oratory-and-social-imaginary-south-asia
).

Additionally, a digital, open-access version is available at the following
link: https://www.sup.org/openebook/9781503628663/

--------------------------------
Constantine V. Nakassis
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology,
Associate Faculty in the Departments of Cinema and Media Studies and
Comparative Human Development, The University of Chicago
Chair, Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS), The University of
Chicago
email: cnakassi at uchicago.edu

https://anthropology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/constantine-v-nakassis
http://nakassis.com/constantine
http://chicagotamilforum.uchicago.edu
https://southasia.uchicago.edu/

<http://chicagotamilforum.uchicago.edu>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/linganth/attachments/20211015/3ff778ad/attachment.htm>