The International Forum for U.S. Studies will be hosting the conference "The Presence of 'America' in India: Where and How Does 'America' Appear and What are the Effects". The conference will be free and open to the public on April 5-7, 2012 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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CONFERENCE:
The Presence of"America" in India: Where and How Does "America" Appear and What are the Effects?
Dates: April5-7, 2012
Location: Levis Faculty Center - TBA (UIUC), 919 West Illinois Street, Urbana, IL
Contact: Anita Kaiser
Email: arkaiser@illinois.edu
Sponsor: International Forum for U.S. Studies
During the last decade, the circulation of ideas, commodities, cultural practices, and cultural products perceived as coming from the U.S. and gaining traction in India has accelerated. We understand this process as a dialectical one, full of multiple transformations/translations/ and effects, and with a substantial history, where India is not merely a "receiving" region, but rather a complex set of national and subnational cultural and political groups actively involved in articulating relationships to "America." We use the term "America" advisedly as it does not presume to reference all of the Americas but rather to capture the sense of the U.S. as both a geo-political entity and a cultural imaginary, that is, not only as a political actor, mediating between Pakistan and India, but also as a cultural influence in many of the contemporary changes in Indian daily life and institutional structures. These include shifting practices of food consumption, modes of fashion, notions of secular democratic politics, the restructuring of Indian higher education institutions, the emphasis on "American" accents in English speech, employment in U.S. corporation customer service "call centers," the impact of the presence of the US business corporations (such as IBM), new developments in Indian agriculture and engineering, the migration of hip hop style dancing into Bollywood musicals, the much contested"brain drain" to the United States, and so on.
Invited plenary speakers from India and the U.S.including UIUC are confirmed. More details to follow. For additional information please visit IFUSS: http://ips.illinois.edu/ifuss/
FREE& OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Co-sponsors:
Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies - India Studies Fund, College of Business, College of Education,
College of Liberal Arts, Department of Anthropology, Department of English, Department of Landscape Architecture, Department of Sociology, Hewlett International Conference Grant, International Programs and Studies, Program in Comparative and World Literature, Religious Studies, School of Social Work, UIUC Office of Public Relations, Vice Chancellor for Research
