Henry Schwarz | The Open University (original) (raw)
Drafts by Henry Schwarz
Timirpanthi: Pilgrims of Darkness, 2019
Preface to Dhruv Bhatt, Pilgrims of Darkness
Dialogues on Cultural Studies: Interviews with Contemporary Critics, 2002
Questioning the discourse of development, especially in light of the barbaric wars of conquest in... more Questioning the discourse of development, especially in light of the barbaric wars of conquest in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Indiaspora: Theories, Histories, Texts, ed. Makarand Paranjape (New Delhi: Indialog Publications, 2001) 171-178., 2001
Shashwati Talukdar and Sudipto Chatterjee have produced exemplary documents of the South Asian - ... more Shashwati Talukdar and Sudipto Chatterjee have produced exemplary documents of the South Asian - US immigrant experience.
Ariel: A Review of International English Literaturee, 1995
Discussion of Arif Dirlik's attack on postcolonial theorists. Boils down to tribal warfare.
Papers by Henry Schwarz
Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers, ed. Deepika Bahri and Filippo Menozzi (New YorK: Modern Language Association)., 2021
Practical teaching tips for reading Imaginary Maps with US students
American Comparative Literature Association, 2014
The Thugs were hereditary highway robbers and stranglers who were violently suppressed by 1840. Y... more The Thugs were hereditary highway robbers and stranglers who were violently suppressed by 1840. Yet the British kept discovering new threats to their authority. In 1871 almost two hundred tribal communities were criminalized, subject to surveillance, registration and confinement Thug today signifies a proud new identity assumed by African Americans critical of white supremacy, and of radical Indian performers reclaiming their images from the stereotype of inherited criminality.
Tessituras, Interacoes, Convergencias, ed. Sandra Nitrini (Sao Paolo: Abralic Hucitec Editora), 2011
Dakxin Chhara's experimental realism
Vimukta: Freedom Stories Navayana Publishers, 2021
Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies, 1996
Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies, 1996
First anthology of original work in the new disciplinary field of Cultural Studies from A global ... more First anthology of original work in the new disciplinary field of Cultural Studies from A global perspective.
Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance, eds. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower and Peter Hulme (New York: Routledge: 2015) 20 pp., 2015
A close reading of a realist documentary by film maker Dakxin Chhara detailing the excruciating c... more A close reading of a realist documentary by film maker Dakxin Chhara detailing the excruciating conditions of salt production in western Gujarat.
a montage drawn from the popular internet program Google Maps. The montage instructs us that during the Roman Empire soldiers were paid in salt. In ancient Greece slaves were purchased with salt to sustain the sybaritic lifestyle of the free men. During the movement for India's independence, a march to the sea was staged by the liberator, Mahatma Gandhi, to protest the tax on salt levied by the British colonizers. India attained its freedom in 1947. Today, continues the montage, India is the world's third-largest producer of salt, and seventy percent of that comes from the state of Gujarat. Sixty percent of that number comes from the far western districts of the Little Rann of Kutch on the Arabian Sea. "But. .. where," asks the video, "are the salt workers?" Some of India's most marginalized communities continue to harvest salt under almost prehistoric conditions. In the three-thousand-year history narrated by the opening, little has changed in either the cheapness or importance of salt. It is significant for both the style and content of what follows that this historical stasis should be staged in terms of space as much as time; the Google Maps program is utilized to provide planet-sized images that scale down to locate their civilizations geographically, in this case giving us a global mapping of one of the world's most prized commodities. Yet both the high symbolic value and the penuriousness of its extraction have remained unchanged over three millennia. Thus timelessness is represented as space; perhaps space more adequately captures the experience of the ahistorical, repetitive temporality of a seemingly eternal process. That this commodity has been universally prized yet is still extracted under near-slavery conditions in modern, technological India remains the mystery of the film to explore. Dakxin's cinematic production to date numbers short videos, each credited to his larger performing group Budhan Theatre even when individually scripted, shot, edited, or distributed. Dakxin is a member of a formerly nomadic tribe known as Chhara, who were forcibly settled in the 1930s on the site of their present domicile in Ahmedabad, western India. The history and exploits of the settled tribes is still largely unknown to most Indians, although everyone is aware of the Chhara reputation for thievery, bootlegging, and petty crime of all types. The Chharas are one of about 190 communities that were criminalized under British rule. Beginning in 1871 a series of legislative acts subjected various marginal populations to heavy surveillance and impositions on their movement. Police were given special powers to register members of these groups without evidence of crime and eventually to relocate them into settlements and recruit them for heavy labor. After Indian independence the criminal tribes were given a new identity designed to free them from the criminal stigma. They were christened Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs), and quickly reclassified under legislation for habitual offenders. The Chharas today live in a free colony in close proximity to their former penal settlement and the police station. Yet harassment and bribery still threaten their daily existence, and jail is a common experience. Members of Dakxin's DATE \*
Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, 2004
A survey of recent challenges to the western literary canon by multi-ethnic expression spanning t... more A survey of recent challenges to the western literary canon by multi-ethnic expression spanning the continent.
Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, 2016
A global, comprehensive survey of colonial dynamics and postcolonial resistance spanning five hun... more A global, comprehensive survey of colonial dynamics and postcolonial resistance spanning five hundred years.
Journal of the South Asia Literary Association, 2008
Methods of practical conflict transformation through the arts, with special reference to the non-... more Methods of practical conflict transformation through the arts, with special reference to the non-violent protest of Budhan Theatre of Ahmedabad.
Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India, 2010
An overview of the work of the Salvation Army in managing criminal tribes in India during the ear... more An overview of the work of the Salvation Army in managing criminal tribes in India during the early twentieth century, with special reference to the Ahmedabad settlement.
Contributions to Bengal studies : an interdisciplinary and international approach, 1998
A wide ranging anthology of proceedings from the Bengal Studies Conference held at Georgetown Un... more A wide ranging anthology of proceedings from the Bengal Studies Conference held at Georgetown University, The paper discusses the predominant association of tribal identity with criminal activity in Purulia District, West Bengal.
Schwarz/Ray A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, 2000
An overview of Postcolonial Studies as practiced globally in the year 2000. The volume contain... more An overview of Postcolonial Studies as practiced globally in the year 2000.
The volume contains twenty original essays on a multiplicity of subjects spanning the state of the discipline in 2000..
Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India, 2010
An overview of the activities of Budhan Theatre from 1998 to 2010,
Timirpanthi: Pilgrims of Darkness, 2019
Preface to Dhruv Bhatt, Pilgrims of Darkness
Dialogues on Cultural Studies: Interviews with Contemporary Critics, 2002
Questioning the discourse of development, especially in light of the barbaric wars of conquest in... more Questioning the discourse of development, especially in light of the barbaric wars of conquest in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Indiaspora: Theories, Histories, Texts, ed. Makarand Paranjape (New Delhi: Indialog Publications, 2001) 171-178., 2001
Shashwati Talukdar and Sudipto Chatterjee have produced exemplary documents of the South Asian - ... more Shashwati Talukdar and Sudipto Chatterjee have produced exemplary documents of the South Asian - US immigrant experience.
Ariel: A Review of International English Literaturee, 1995
Discussion of Arif Dirlik's attack on postcolonial theorists. Boils down to tribal warfare.
Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers, ed. Deepika Bahri and Filippo Menozzi (New YorK: Modern Language Association)., 2021
Practical teaching tips for reading Imaginary Maps with US students
American Comparative Literature Association, 2014
The Thugs were hereditary highway robbers and stranglers who were violently suppressed by 1840. Y... more The Thugs were hereditary highway robbers and stranglers who were violently suppressed by 1840. Yet the British kept discovering new threats to their authority. In 1871 almost two hundred tribal communities were criminalized, subject to surveillance, registration and confinement Thug today signifies a proud new identity assumed by African Americans critical of white supremacy, and of radical Indian performers reclaiming their images from the stereotype of inherited criminality.
Tessituras, Interacoes, Convergencias, ed. Sandra Nitrini (Sao Paolo: Abralic Hucitec Editora), 2011
Dakxin Chhara's experimental realism
Vimukta: Freedom Stories Navayana Publishers, 2021
Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies, 1996
Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies, 1996
First anthology of original work in the new disciplinary field of Cultural Studies from A global ... more First anthology of original work in the new disciplinary field of Cultural Studies from A global perspective.
Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance, eds. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower and Peter Hulme (New York: Routledge: 2015) 20 pp., 2015
A close reading of a realist documentary by film maker Dakxin Chhara detailing the excruciating c... more A close reading of a realist documentary by film maker Dakxin Chhara detailing the excruciating conditions of salt production in western Gujarat.
a montage drawn from the popular internet program Google Maps. The montage instructs us that during the Roman Empire soldiers were paid in salt. In ancient Greece slaves were purchased with salt to sustain the sybaritic lifestyle of the free men. During the movement for India's independence, a march to the sea was staged by the liberator, Mahatma Gandhi, to protest the tax on salt levied by the British colonizers. India attained its freedom in 1947. Today, continues the montage, India is the world's third-largest producer of salt, and seventy percent of that comes from the state of Gujarat. Sixty percent of that number comes from the far western districts of the Little Rann of Kutch on the Arabian Sea. "But. .. where," asks the video, "are the salt workers?" Some of India's most marginalized communities continue to harvest salt under almost prehistoric conditions. In the three-thousand-year history narrated by the opening, little has changed in either the cheapness or importance of salt. It is significant for both the style and content of what follows that this historical stasis should be staged in terms of space as much as time; the Google Maps program is utilized to provide planet-sized images that scale down to locate their civilizations geographically, in this case giving us a global mapping of one of the world's most prized commodities. Yet both the high symbolic value and the penuriousness of its extraction have remained unchanged over three millennia. Thus timelessness is represented as space; perhaps space more adequately captures the experience of the ahistorical, repetitive temporality of a seemingly eternal process. That this commodity has been universally prized yet is still extracted under near-slavery conditions in modern, technological India remains the mystery of the film to explore. Dakxin's cinematic production to date numbers short videos, each credited to his larger performing group Budhan Theatre even when individually scripted, shot, edited, or distributed. Dakxin is a member of a formerly nomadic tribe known as Chhara, who were forcibly settled in the 1930s on the site of their present domicile in Ahmedabad, western India. The history and exploits of the settled tribes is still largely unknown to most Indians, although everyone is aware of the Chhara reputation for thievery, bootlegging, and petty crime of all types. The Chharas are one of about 190 communities that were criminalized under British rule. Beginning in 1871 a series of legislative acts subjected various marginal populations to heavy surveillance and impositions on their movement. Police were given special powers to register members of these groups without evidence of crime and eventually to relocate them into settlements and recruit them for heavy labor. After Indian independence the criminal tribes were given a new identity designed to free them from the criminal stigma. They were christened Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs), and quickly reclassified under legislation for habitual offenders. The Chharas today live in a free colony in close proximity to their former penal settlement and the police station. Yet harassment and bribery still threaten their daily existence, and jail is a common experience. Members of Dakxin's DATE \*
Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, 2004
A survey of recent challenges to the western literary canon by multi-ethnic expression spanning t... more A survey of recent challenges to the western literary canon by multi-ethnic expression spanning the continent.
Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, 2016
A global, comprehensive survey of colonial dynamics and postcolonial resistance spanning five hun... more A global, comprehensive survey of colonial dynamics and postcolonial resistance spanning five hundred years.
Journal of the South Asia Literary Association, 2008
Methods of practical conflict transformation through the arts, with special reference to the non-... more Methods of practical conflict transformation through the arts, with special reference to the non-violent protest of Budhan Theatre of Ahmedabad.
Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India, 2010
An overview of the work of the Salvation Army in managing criminal tribes in India during the ear... more An overview of the work of the Salvation Army in managing criminal tribes in India during the early twentieth century, with special reference to the Ahmedabad settlement.
Contributions to Bengal studies : an interdisciplinary and international approach, 1998
A wide ranging anthology of proceedings from the Bengal Studies Conference held at Georgetown Un... more A wide ranging anthology of proceedings from the Bengal Studies Conference held at Georgetown University, The paper discusses the predominant association of tribal identity with criminal activity in Purulia District, West Bengal.
Schwarz/Ray A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, 2000
An overview of Postcolonial Studies as practiced globally in the year 2000. The volume contain... more An overview of Postcolonial Studies as practiced globally in the year 2000.
The volume contains twenty original essays on a multiplicity of subjects spanning the state of the discipline in 2000..
Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India, 2010
An overview of the activities of Budhan Theatre from 1998 to 2010,
Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India, 2010
Recipies for branding tribals and nomads as criminal elements during the British Empire in India.
... In India, Meena Radhakrishna, Kanji Patel, Avinash Gaikwad, Laxman Gaikwad, Dilip D&a... more ... In India, Meena Radhakrishna, Kanji Patel, Avinash Gaikwad, Laxman Gaikwad, Dilip D'Souza, the members of Budhan Theatre, and the people of Chharanagar were early, enthusiastic support-ers. ... This was again supplemented by singing, dancing and prostitution. ...
Modern Language Quarterly, 2005
A lengthy, critical review of an influential book by Professor Priya Joshi.
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2006
A measured review of an incidental book by Mari Thekaekara that questions the moral outrage over ... more A measured review of an incidental book by Mari Thekaekara that questions the moral outrage over manual sweeping.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Special Topic: Postcolonial American Studies, 2005
The Editorial addresses the issue of extending American imperial power without holding formal col... more The Editorial addresses the issue of extending American imperial power without holding formal colonies, as in previous empires. This "American exceptionalism" is being countered and subverted in countless way throughout the post-imperialist world by multifarious acts of sabotage, deception, defiance, the the creation of new miltipolar alliances.
This special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies addresses the two related yet distinct challenges confronting what we term postcolonial American studies, Sites of resistance cross queer, ecololgical, regional and production locations.