Please join us for a talk from Natasha Raheja (Cornell University), titled "Beyond the National Frame: Scenes from the Indo-Pak Border" as part of Harvard University's Dept. of Anthropology Social Anthropology Seminar Series.
Abstract:
“In this talk, I present my use of formal filmic techniques across two works to advance a visual argument about mobility and borders in South Asia. Borders are readily made legible through visual representations and material practices such as maps, fences, walls, passports, flags, news coverage, and the like. But what happens when one shuffles the narrative? I dice, splice, and recombine images of borders to generate a picture of the border that is not amenable to figurative absorption. Mainstream representations of the India-Pakistan border emphasize polarity, but I show that the border is a continuous space even as it is a marker of discontinuity. Specifically, my stylistic use of juxtaposition, montage, glitch, and split-screen exposes reductions and excesses of the nation-state order. I will screen from A Gregarious Species (2021, 9 min) and Kitne Passports? (in-production) to convey how, like the filmic cut, the border produces a shared and segmented space. Culling together found footage and composing my own images, I argue that working within the visual medium itself can unravel mental pictures about the fixity of borders.”
A Gregarious Species (2021, 9 min)
What do bugs and borders have to do with each other? Bringing together mobile phone videos of transboundary gregarious locust swarms, political rallies, and scientific webinars, this found-footage, experimental video raises questions about the selective porosity of borders amidst environmental crisis, farmer insecurity, and nationalism in South Asia.
Kitne Passports? (in production, 15-min visual sample)
What does waiting for a welcome feel like? Follow four, cross-caste Pakistani Hindu migrant families as they shift between minority and majority status, navigating uncertain futures in India.
About Natasha Raheja:
I am a political and visual anthropologist working in the areas of migration, borders, state power, aesthetics, and ethnographic film. My current research generates medium-specific insights across writing and film to advance political theory on majority-minority relations and majoritarianism. In the context of cross-border migration and immigration policy in South Asia, I ask, how do majorities come to imagine themselves as minorities? Conversely, how do minorities come to imagine justice as part of majorities? How do majority-minority politics exceed the parameters of states, in ways that are not nation bound?
Currently in production, my documentary film, Kitne Passports? (How many Passports?), features cross-caste, Pakistani Hindu migrant families in India, visualizing their everyday identifications and disidentifications as they shift between minority and majority status. The film is a companion to my book manuscript, From Minority to Majority: Pakistani Hindu Claims to Indian Citizenship. The book is an ethnographic account of Pakistani Hindu migration to India that theorizes the flexibility of the religious minority form across state borders in South Asia. Together, this work explores the relationships between religious nationalism, state machinery, and modes of cross-border belonging in the context of majority-minority relations in liberal democracies.
Extending my interest in uneven mobilities and borders, I am also completing an experimental short film series on the movement of non-human animals and everyday objects across the India-Pakistan border. Films in the series include: A Gregarious Species, Kaagaz ke chakkar, and Enemy Property. I believe that the study and production of film offer insights into the embodied, sensory dimensions of knowledge production. My first ethnographic film, Cast in India, raised questions around the relationship between built infrastructure in New York City and labor infrastructure in Howrah, India in the context of everyday urban objects such as manhole covers.