Iftikhar Dadi organizes a major conference on cultural responses to climate change in South Asia.
The Next Monsoon: Climate Change and Contemporary Cultural Production in South Asia
Three-day conference: October 27 -29, 2023
Johnson Museum of Art, 114 Central Ave, Ithaca
South Asia is an empirical microcosm of the ecological and epistemological upending caused by climate change. Forming a quarter of the world's population and inhabiting tremendous cultural and geographic diversity, South Asia provides a unique case study for examining the challenges of climate change on diverse cultural forms. Climate change has indelibly altered landscapes and people, from Bangladeshi river deltas to Nepali mountaintops to Pakistani deserts to Indian megalopolises to Maldivian islands.
This conference thus asks: How is climate change rendered in visual arts, cinema, literature, and architecture in South Asia? How do projects of cultural expression render visibility to place-based narratives in South Asia? A humanistic approach to climate change entails developing modes of attention to a world yet to come. Centering the human imagination in the scientized field of climate change engenders a view of environmental variation over time that highlights the flexibility, resilience, and persistence of human life and its relation to the nonhuman worlds. Such a perspective links meaning and materiality, ingenuity, imagination, literature and livelihoods, subsistence, and stories.
The event is free and open to the public.
Organized by Iftikhar Dadi (Cornell University), Sarah Besky (Cornell University), Sonal Khullar (University of Pennsylvania), and Rupali Gupte (School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai).
https://museum.cornell.edu/event/the-next-monsoon-climate-change-and-contemporary-cultural-production-in-south-asia/
Supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Central New York Humanities Corridor. Cosponsored by the Johnson Museum of Art and its Stoikov Asian Art Lecture Fund.
