Nations in Fragments: Conference Honoring Partha Chatterjee

September 15 & 16, 2023

Columbia University


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Registration/Attendance

Program

Organizing Team

Manan Ahmed
Karuna Mantena
David Scott
Nicole Peisajovich
Charles Gerard Thibault Battaglini

About

Partha Chatterjee is one of the most original and critical thinkers of nationalism, populism, and postcolonial democracy. A leading historian, anthropologist, political theorist, and public intellectual, Chatterjee’s path-breaking work has shaped a generation of scholarship on the politics and history of the nation-state in postcolonial times. A founding member of the “Subaltern Studies” collective, his scholarship critiqued much of the conventional wisdom about nationalism in the 1980s and 1990s. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986) was a landmark statement on the discursive contradictions and limits of anti-colonial nationalism. In the acclaimed intervention The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Chatterjee deftly pivoted away from state-centered ideas of nationhood to chart and conceptualize the heterogeneity internal to nationalism, from historical constructions of difference to the identities and experiences that nationalism reconfigures.

With The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (2004) and Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (2011), Chatterjee honed in on practices of popular politics that were invisible to traditional lenses of political theory. He proposed a wholly novel viewpoint and conceptual vocabulary to understand new forms of popular mobilization which themselves were intimately bound with the arrival of postcolonial democracy. Over the past four decades, from The Nation and Its Fragments, The Politics of the Governed, to I am the People, Chatterjee has provided some of the most original and influential theoretical frameworks for the study of the postcolony in Africa, Asia, Latin America and in a fruitful comparative frame with Europe and North America.

“Nations in Fragments” draws together key interlocutors from across the disciplines to engage Professor Chatterjee’s decisive scholarly interventions on nationalism and democracy and build new conceptual vocabularies to meet the challenges of democratic decline, nationalist resurgence, capitalist crises, and climate catastrophe.

Participants

Gianpaolo Baiocci
Moinak Biswas
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Ruchi Chaturvedi
Divya Cherian
Ayça Çubukçu
Sandipto Dasgupta
Souleymane Bachir Diagne
Rohit De
Abhishek Kaicker
Sudipta Kaviraj
Mana Kia
Mahmood Mamdani
Nivedita Menon
Shayoni Mitra
Debashree Mukherjee
Suman Mukhopadhyay
Suren Pillay
Gyan Prakash
Anupama Rao
Mrinalini Sinha
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Anand Vivek Taneja
Gauri Vishwanathan

Funding & Support

Format

The first day of the conference, we have asked four panels with set of scholars will offer a 15 min comment linking their work with Chatterjee, or on an aspect of his critical interventions. The panels will be followed by an ‘open mic’ reception.

The second day will begin with a keynote by Professor Chatterjee, followed by an extended roundtable.

Venue

Buell Hall, Columbia

Lodgings

A Loft Harlem

Dinner

Le Monde, Saturday night (for panelists only)

Visa & Reimbursements

We are happy to provide a letter if you need a visa to travel for the conference. We are happy to reimburse your air or train transportation to the workshop. We will sponsor five nights stay for participants coming from outside US and three night stay for those joining us from within US. Please find below instructions for reimbursements:

Guidelines for Travel Reimbursements
All payees must submit a tax form and an expense form in addition to receipts and proof of payment in order to receive reimbursement. Please ensure all of the information on the expense form is legible. If there are questions or problems with the payment, the payee will be contacted via email. Payee should request reimbursement within 10 days of the expense/trip. Please Note: The University observes all INS and IRS regulations regarding payment to nonresident aliens. Certain visa types preclude payment of expenses, professional services, per diem, or salary.
Payable foreign nationals must submit a W-8BEN form, copy of passport (visa page and ID page), a Non-Employee Expense form, and receipts.
United States Citizens and Permanent Residents: Citizens and Permanent Residents seeking expense reimbursement must submit a W-9 form, a Non-Employee Expense form, and receipts.
Required forms
- W-9
- W-8BEN