Past Events

Chhachhi examines dominant media representations which construct reductionist perceptions of the conflict in Kashmir.

Panel Discussants: Joan Acocella, Joe Goode (Theater, Dance and Performance Studies), Wendy Lesser (Editor, The Threepenny Review) and Suzana Sawyer (Anthropology, UC Davis)

Joan Acocella is a dance and book critic for The New Yorker. She has served as the senior critic and reviews editor for Dance Magazine and New York dance critic for London’s Financial Times.

At this workshop, Chhachhi discusses the slippage between the unmediated “truth” of testimony and the highly mediated statements made by artists around the same experience.

This photo installation by Chhachhi and Sonia Jabbar invites viewers to enter the private life of war, to hear voices often obscured by the clamor of stereotypes—the unheard voices of ordinary women of the Kashmir Valley. Testimonies gathered over six years break through the homogenizing divide of “Muslims” versus “Hindus.” Despite many differences, the women have one overwhelming thing in common: a rejection of the gun as a solution to political issues.

This exhibition relocates the mythological figure of Neelkanth, in the contemporary Indian city, where each of the five elements (earth, fire, water, air, and ether), the five senses (smell, sight, taste, touch, and hearing), and the power of the word itself is poisoned. The exhibit asks if we, like the archetypal Neelkanth, can find means of containment and transformation; if we can make nectar from poison.

A roundtable with Mary Louise Pratt and Berkeley faculty.

Panel Discussants: Mary Louise Pratt, Claire Kramsch (Berkeley Language Center), Bharati Mukherjee (English), Geoffrey Nunberg (Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University) and José David Saldívar (English, Ethnic Studies)

Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University.