Episodios

  • Stephen Harris, "Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Santideva on Virtue and Well-Being" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

    Stephen Harris, "Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Santideva on Virtue and Well-Being" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
    Jul 20 2024
    An influential eighth-century Buddhist text, Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, or Guide to the Practices of Awakening, how to become a supremely virtuous person, a bodhisattva who desires to end the suffering of all sentient beings. Stephen Harris’s Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Śāntideva on Virtue and Well-Being (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) is a study of the Guide. It articulates Śāntideva’s moral psychology and virtue theory in chapter-length treatments of four central virtues: generosity, patience, compassion, and wisdom. According to Harris, Śāntideva thinks these virtues benefit human persons, and thus the radically altruistic bodhisattva path is also a self-interested one. Harris’s book also explores how this ethical project coheres with the emptiness of all things, the famous Madhyamaka denial of intrinsic nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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    1 h y 18 m
  • Filmmaker, Artist, Writer: A Conversation with Paromita Vohra

    Filmmaker, Artist, Writer: A Conversation with Paromita Vohra
    Jul 19 2024
    This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues. In this episode, our host, Kinjal Dave, sits down with filmmaker, artist, and writer Paromita Vohra for a wide-ranging conversation about the artist’s career. As an artist, Vohra has worked across a variety of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art and writing to explore themes of feminism, desire, sexuality and popular culture. In this interview, she reflects on the provocations and practices that have shaped her approach as an artist, as well as the pedagogical possibilities that multimodal artworks provide in the classroom. Over the next forty-five minutes, you will hear about: What inspired Paromita Vohra to pick up a camera The challenges of building and sustaining a career as an independent filmmaker Social, political, and cultural shifts in the India during the 1990s that informed Vohra’s media production How digital media technologies and the Internet shaped Vohra’s work How Unlimited Girls sought to capture a particular moment within a globalizing feminist discourse, How Vohra has rejected certain aesthetic and narrative paradigms to craft her own style and voice as an artist, straddling comedy, irony, and politically incisive commentary Vohra’s digital platform Agents of Ishq and the sense of community the project has built How to cultivate and encourage complex conversations about gender, sex, desire, and politics in the classroom Building intimacy with audiences and being vulnerable to criticism Vohra’s upcoming projects …and more! Guest Biography Paromita Vohra is an artist who works with a range of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art and writing to explore themes of feminism, desire, sexuality and popular culture. Her extraordinary body of truth-telling, kinetic and intensely sensuous films, online videos, art installations, television programming and writing have made sense of feminism, love, sexuality, urban life and popular culture for a diverse and loving audience for over 25 years. Host Bio Kinjal Dave is a PhD Student at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She researches critical perspectives on gender, technology, and labor in the South Asian diaspora at the intersection of Media and Communication Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Diaspora Studies. She is a fellow with the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) and an affiliate of Data & Society Research Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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    51 m
  • Reid B. Locklin, "Hindu Mission, Christian Mission: Soundings in Comparative Theology" (SUNY Press, 2024)

    Reid B. Locklin, "Hindu Mission, Christian Mission: Soundings in Comparative Theology" (SUNY Press, 2024)
    Jul 18 2024
    For some four hundred years, Hindus and Christians have been engaged in a public controversy about conversion and missionary proselytization, especially in India and the Hindu diaspora. Hindu Mission, Christian Mission: Soundings in Comparative Theology (SUNY Press, 2024) reframes this controversy by shifting attention from "conversion" to a wider, interreligious study of "mission" as a category of thought and practice. Comparative theologian Reid B. Locklin traces the emergence of the nondualist Hindu teaching of Advaita Vedānta as a missionary tradition, from the eighth century to the present day, and draws this tradition into dialogue with contemporary proposals in Christian missiology. As a descriptive study of the Chinmaya Mission, the Ramakrishna Mission, and other leading Advaita mission movements, Hindu Mission, Christian Mission contributes to a growing body of scholarship on transnational Hinduism. As a speculative work of Christian comparative theology, it develops key themes from this engagement for a new, interreligious theology of mission and conversion for the twenty-first century and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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    28 m
  • Jonathan Connolly, "Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Jonathan Connolly, "Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Jul 13 2024
    In Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Jonathan Connolly traces the normalization of indenture from its controversial beginnings to its widespread adoption across the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Initially viewed as a covert revival of slavery, indenture caused a scandal in Britain and India. But over time, economic conflict in the colonies altered public perceptions of indenture, now increasingly viewed as a legitimate form of free labor and a means of preserving the promise of abolition. Connolly explains how the large-scale, state-sponsored migration of Indian subjects to work on sugar plantations across Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad transformed both the notion of post-slavery free labor and the political economy of emancipation. Excavating legal and public debates and tracing practical applications of the law, Connolly carefully reconstructs how the categories of free and unfree labor were made and remade to suit the interests of capital and empire, showing that emancipation was not simply a triumphal event but, rather, a deeply contested process. In so doing, he advances an original interpretation of how indenture changed the meaning of “freedom” in a post-abolition world. Jonathan Connolly is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois Chicago. Connolly is a historian of the British empire with transnational interests in migration, the history of emancipation, and legal history. His research primarily concerns abolition and emancipation, imperial political and legal culture, and the category of free labor in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. Your host for this episode is Mahishan Gnanaseharan, a PhD student in the Department of History at Stanford University. Mahishan studies the social, political, and intellectual histories of South Asian migrants across the Indian Ocean during the 19th and 20th centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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    1 h y 8 m
  • Rory Lindsay, "Saving the Dead: Tibetan Funerary Rituals in the Tradition of the Sarvardurgatipariśodhana Tantra" (WSTB, 2024)

    Rory Lindsay, "Saving the Dead: Tibetan Funerary Rituals in the Tradition of the Sarvardurgatipariśodhana Tantra" (WSTB, 2024)
    Jul 11 2024
    Saving the Dead: Tibetan Funerary Rituals in the Tradition of the Sarvardurgatipariśodhana Tantra (WSTB, 2024) explores Tibetan funerary manuals based on the Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Tantra (SDP), focusing on the writings of the Sa skya author Rje btsun Grags pa rgyal mtshan (1147–1216) and the diverse forms of agency—human, nonhuman, and material—articulated in his texts. It also examines the polemical responses evoked by Grags pa rgyal mtshan’s manuals from Bo dong Paṇ chen Phyogs las rnam gyal (1375/6–1451) and Go rams pa Bsod nams seng ge (1429–89), elucidating key points of contention including methodologies for site preparation in funeral rites, visualization practices involving objects representing the deceased, and the relationship between tantric narrative and ritual enactment. Finally, the study analyzes A mes zhabs Ngag dbang kun dga’ bsod nams’s (1597–1659) attempt to integrate advanced bardo practices characteristic of highest yogatantra into the yogatantric rites delineated in the SDP, underscoring divergent assumptions about postmortem agency reflected in works classified as yogatantra and highest yogatantra. This book is available open access here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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    43 m
  • Darshana Sreedhar Mini, "Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India" (U California Press, 2024)

    Darshana Sreedhar Mini, "Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India" (U California Press, 2024)
    Jul 7 2024
    In the 1990s, India's mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (U California Press, 2024), Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema—such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema—and maps the genre's circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as South Asian pornography. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, Mini also explores the soft-porn industry's utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, as well as how actresses and production personnel who are marked by their involvement with a taboo form negotiate their social lives. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy, and censorship in contemporary India, this study offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space, emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries. Dr. Darshana Sreedhar Mini is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. She did her PhD from the University of Southern California. Her teaching and research lie at the intersection of gender, sexuality, transnational media, migrant media and screen cultures of South Asia. She is the co-editor of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene (Routledge, 2024). Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. Her interdisciplinary academic interests lie at the intersection of film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, anthropology of the body, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Khadeeja Amenda is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore. She can be reached at khadeejaamenda@u.nus.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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    1 h y 22 m
  • Ellen Gough, "Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

    Ellen Gough, "Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
    Jul 6 2024
    Jainism originated in India and shares some features with Buddhism and Hinduism, but it is a distinct tradition with its own key texts, art, rituals, beliefs, and history. One important way it has often been distinguished from Buddhism and Hinduism is through the highly contested category of Tantra: Jainism, unlike the others, does not contain a tantric path to liberation. But in Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation (U Chicago Press, 2021), historian of religions Ellen Gough refines and challenges our understanding of Tantra by looking at the development over two millennia of a Jain incantation, or mantra, that evolved from an auspicious invocation in a second-century text into a key component of mendicant initiations and meditations that continue to this day. Typically, Jainism is characterized as a celibate, ascetic path to liberation in which one destroys karma through austerities, while the tantric path to liberation is characterized as embracing the pleasures of the material world, requiring the ritual use of mantras to destroy karma. Gough, however, argues that asceticism and Tantra should not be viewed in opposition to one another. She does so by showing that Jains perform "tantric" rituals of initiation and meditation on mantras and maṇḍalas. Jainism includes kinds of tantric practices, Gough provocatively argues, because tantric practices are a logical extension of the ascetic path to liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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    1 h y 2 m
  • Neena Mahadev, "Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka" (Columbia UP, 2023)

    Neena Mahadev, "Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka" (Columbia UP, 2023)
    Jul 6 2024
    Around the turn of the millennium, Pentecostal churches began to pepper majority-Buddhist Sri Lanka, setting off a sense of alarm among Buddhists who saw Christianity as a neocolonial threat to the nation. Rumors of foul play in the death of a Buddhist monk, as well as allegations of proselytizing in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami and during the final stages of civil war, spurred nationalist anxieties, moral panics, and even episodes of violence by Buddhists against Christians suspected of facilitating “unethical” conversions. Through vivid ethnography and keen observations of media events, Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka (Columbia UP, 2023) illuminates disputes over religious freedom and pluralism amid the rise of charismatic Christianity in Sri Lanka. Neena Mahadev explores the dueling efforts of Buddhist nationalists and Christian evangelists to reshape Sri Lanka’s religious, economic, and political landscapes. She considers theological and political impasses between Buddhism’s vast timescales of karma and Christians’ promises of the immediacy of their God’s salvific grace. While Christian missions spread “the Good News,” subsets of Buddhists produced bad press, sting operations, and disparaging media to impede born-again churches from taking root. In gripping detail, Mahadev recounts how modernist and traditionalist Theravāda Buddhists, Pentecostal newcomers, long-established Christian denominations, local deity and spirit cults, and the innovations of mavericks intermingle in a multireligious public sphere. Even amid trenchant conflicts, Karma and Grace demonstrates that social proximity between rivals is also conducive to religious experimentation and the ambiguities of identity that allow Sri Lankans to live with difference. Neena Mahadev is an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale-NUS College and holds a courtesy appointment with the National University of Singapore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies
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    1 h y 24 m