Reena Saini Kallat

In Reena Saini Kallat’s works over the last several years the border, the territory, and the map have recurred as potent forms that point to broad historical narratives as well as the manner in which humankind has left the imprint of history on geography. Her own family history overlaps with the partition of the subcontinent into the two entities of India and Pakistan in 1947, an action that resulted in mass migration on both sides of the border. Her approach, both poetic and speculative, explores a confluence of ideas that contest political and social boundaries. River Drawing points to the absurdity of national efforts to discipline and claim ever-moving bodies of water by reshaping the landscape. In this subversive work, the artist marks/draws the borders between countries that are in conflict over the sharing of their common river waters. Groups of such outlines of manmade political borders were repurposed by variously arranging them. The resulting permutations of lines give rise to a more familiar, liberating topography where rigid territorial lines of separation seamlessly transform into a free-flowing river, carving a new topography with a flowing river forming the landscape.

Readings in Comparative Health Law and Bioethics examines how different countries around the world approach the same challenges in health care law and ethics: how to finance care for as many people as possible; how to ensure quality care; how to best secure patients’ rights; how to regulate abortion, end of life decision-making, and assisted reproduction; and how to manage infectious diseases, tobacco use, and human subject research. The new edition considers a broader array of countries, particularly from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.

A century ago, activists confronting racism and colonialism―in India, South Africa, and Black America―used print media to connect with one another. Then, as now, the most effective medium for their undertakings was the English language. Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone tells the story of this interconnected Anglophone world. Through Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on China, Mahatma Gandhi’s recollections of South Africa, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s invocations of India, Madhumita Lahiri theorizes print internationalism. This methodology requires new terms within the worldwide hegemony of the English language (“the global Anglophone”) in order to encourage alternate geographies (such as the Global South) and new collectivities (such as people of color).

The women of print internationalism feature prominently in this account. Sonja Schlesin, born in Moscow, worked with Indians in South Africa. Sister Nivedita, an Irish woman in India, collaborated with a Japanese historian. Jessie Redmon Fauset, an African American, brought the world home to young readers through her work as an author and editor.

Reading across races and regions, genres and genders, Imperfect Solidarities demonstrates the utility of the neologism for postcolonial literary studies.

Insightful and interdisciplinary, this book considers the movement of people around the world and how contemporary artists contribute to our understanding of it

In this timely volume, artists and thinkers join in conversation around the topic of global migration, examining both its cultural impact and the culture of migration itself. Individual voices shed light on the societal transformations related to migration and its representation in 21st-century art, offering diverse points of entry into this massive phenomenon and its many manifestations.

The featured artworks range from painting, sculpture, and photography to installation, video, and sound art, and their makers―including Isaac Julien, Richard Mosse, Reena Saini Kallat, Yinka Shonibare MBE, and Do Ho Suh, among many others―hail from around the world. Texts by experts in political science, Latin American studies, and human rights, as well as contemporary art, expand upon the political, economic, and social contexts of migration and its representation. The book also includes three conversations in which artists discuss the complexity of making work about migration.

Amid worldwide tensions surrounding refugee crises and border security, this publication provides a nuanced interpretation of the current cultural moment. Intertwining themes of memory, home, activism, and more, When Home Won’t Let You Stay meditates on how art both shapes and is shaped by the public discourse on migration.

How did states come to monopolize control over migration? What do the processes that produced this monopoly tell us about the modern state?
In Indian Migration and Empire Radhika Mongia provocatively argues that the formation of colonial migration regulations was dependent upon, accompanied by and generative of profound changes in normative conceptions of the modern state.
Focused on state regulation of colonial Indian migration between 1834 and 1917, Mongia illuminates the genesis of central techniques of migration control. She shows how important elements of current migration regimes, including the notion of state sovereignty as embodying the authority to control migration, the distinction between free and forced migration, the emergence of passports, the formation of migration bureaucracies and the incorporation of kinship relations into migration logics, are the product of complex debates that attended colonial migrations.
By charting how state control of migration was critical to the transformation of a world dominated by empire-states into a world dominated by nation-states, Mongia challenges positions that posit a stark distinction between the colonial state and the modern state to trace aspects of their entanglements.

The contributors to Territories and Trajectories propose a model of cultural production and transmission based on the global diffusion, circulation, and exchange of people, things, and ideas across time and space. This model eschews a static, geographically bounded notion of cultural origins and authenticity, privileging instead a mobility of culture that shapes and is shaped by geographic spaces. Reading a diverse array of texts and objects, from Ethiopian song and ancient Chinese travel writing to Japanese literature and aerial and nautical images of the Indian Ocean, the contributors decenter national borders to examine global flows of culture and the relationship between thinking at transnational and local scales. Throughout, they make a case for methods of inquiry that encourage innovative understandings of borders, oceans, and territories and that transgress disciplinary divides.

Contributors. Homi Bhabha, Jacqueline Bhabha, Lindsay Bremner, Finbarr Barry Flood, Rosario Hubert, Alina Payne, Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Shu-mei Shih, Diana Sorensen, Karen Thornber, Xiaofei Tian

The Cambridge Companion to World Literature introduces the significant ideas and practices of world literary studies. It provides a lucid and accessible account of the fundamental issues and concepts in world literature, including the problems of imagining the totality of literature; comparing literary works across histories, cultures and languages; and understanding how literary production is affected by forces such as imperialism and globalization. The essays demonstrate how detailed critical engagements with particular literary texts call forth differing conceptions of world literature, and, conversely, how theories of world literature shape our practices of readings. Subjects covered include cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, internationalism, scale and systems, sociological criticism, translation, scripts, and orality. This book also includes original analyses of genres and forms, ranging from tragedy to the novel and graphic fiction, lyric poetry to the short story and world cinema.

The Postcolonial World presents an overview of the field and extends critical debate in exciting new directions. It provides an important and timely reappraisal of postcolonialism as an aesthetic, political, and historical movement, and of postcolonial studies as a multidisciplinary, transcultural field. Essays map the terrain of the postcolonial as a global phenomenon at the intersection of several disciplinary inquiries. Framed by an introductory chapter and a concluding essay, the eight sections examine:

Affective, Postcolonial Histories
Postcolonial Desires
Religious Imaginings
Postcolonial Geographies and Spatial Practices
Human Rights and Postcolonial Conflicts
Postcolonial Cultures and Digital Humanities
Ecocritical Inquiries in Postcolonial Studies
Postcolonialism versus Neoliberalism
The Postcolonial World looks afresh at re-emerging conditions of postcoloniality in the twenty-first century and draws on a wide range of representational strategies, cultural practices, material forms, and affective affiliations. The volume is an essential reading for scholars and students of postcolonialism.

REENA KALLAT Fresh Fossils – IV Acrylic, Oil & Carbon on Canvas 42'' X 88''

Saline 2007 bonded marble, wood, fabric 13 ft I 156 in. diameter The work takes off from an episode in the Hindu Puranas (religious text) called Samudra Manthan. Samudra means ‘the ocean’ and Manthan means ‘to churn’. In this particular episode, the Gods lose their powers due to an instance of arrogance and need the assistance of demons in order to churn the ocean to obtain nectar that would empower them again. A number of herbs were cast into the ocean and the churning produced several objects and beings that were symbolic and served as offerings to please demi-gods. It is believed that to keep the nectar away from the hands of the demons, the gods had to hide it in four different places on earth. These places are since believed to have acquired mystical power and are celebrated as sites of worship. SALINE re-constructs imagery from the myths of the past as well as their re-incarnations in the historical present. The formation of the demon is a sculptural translation of drawings from the Razmnama (illustrated translations of the Hindu epic, Mahabharat into Persian). Artistically speaking, this demon form rendered by Persian illustrators of a Hindu endeavor becomes an interesting secular by-product of the religious cross-pollination of the Hindu epic in the Islamic world. Water has always been seen as the source of all creation. Just like salt is easily missible in water, India is traditionally eulogised for its secular fabric wherein the boundaries of Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and several other religious traditions are said to dissolve. I have set out to make the sculptural installation ‘Saline’ at a time when this fabric is stained by the recurrence of communal conflict. I see ‘Saline’ as a call of hope; the fluid figment of my imagination churned out of contemporary conflicts to symbolically drop nectar in a poisonous ocean, reclaim the spaces of religious worship from the demons of fanaticism and intravenously inject organisms with the rejuvenating and hydrating powers of saline in the endless confrontation between good and evil.

Ruled Paper (red, blue, white), 2018-2019 Hand-knotted, hand-spun, hand-dyed natural wool and silk, wool-covered wire 195x129cm Limited edition of 10 plus one artist’s proof Courtesy of the artist, Chemould Prescott Road and Nature Morte Gallery This rug has a loosely woven plain silk background with wire wrapped in wool for the motif. The wool-wrapped wire is then looped around and sewn into the plain silk background.

The reality of the virtual experience of the art during the times of the pandemic crisis could never override the pleasure of watching the artworks displayed physically. The virtual proximity of the art tours in the galleries and museums kept the viewers’ right to gauge the layers and textures of the art piece at bay. Defying these limitations, the sixth edition of ASIA NOW: Paris Asian Art Fair, from October 21-24, 2020, at Avenue Hoche during Paris Art Week underscored the prerequisite necessity to experience the world of art in real life. Founded by Claude Fain along with his daughter Alexandra Fain, since the first edition of ASIA NOW in 2015, it has strived to present the new perspectives and issues for contemporary Asian art and its market. As a springboard for discussion and interaction on contemporary artistic creation from Asia, the ASIA NOW besides offering a curatorial platform also offers space to lead special projects, including a series of off-site installations, artist video screenings, and a cycle of performances and conversations.

In the middle of March, as many countries around the globe moved into a state of lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, a number of stories emerged about nature reclaiming public spaces in the absence of humankind. While many, including the alleged report of the emergence of dolphins and swans in Venice’s waterways, proved to be mere sensationalism, there have been reports by respectable news channels about animals such as coyotes, boars and peacocks making appearances in urban centres across North America and Europe. Dialectically opposing this eco-utopian narrative are the fears of environmentalists that the loss of economic mobility in the global south might cause more people to seek occupations that might have an adverse effect on their regional ecosystems. Besides its effect on the world’s fauna, there have been other occurrences that have been almost unprecedented for the contemporary experience including a circumstantial drop in the use of fossil fuels, leading to clearer skies and fresher air, and influential stakeholders in the global economy considering reforms in economic and environmental policy. From the dawn of civilisation, humanity has had a push-pull relationship with nature but in the last 400 years it has progressively verged on infringement, and has culminated in phenomena such as global warming and an accelerated depletion of much of the planet’s resources. It is against this backdrop that that Potential Worlds 1: Planetary Memories opened at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, Switzerland, on March 7, incidentally just weeks before most of the world went into quarantine, setting into motion the events mentioned earlier that have urged us, as a collective, to look at our connection with nature with a revised reflexivity.