IACS roundtable to mark the publication of Tejaswini Niranjana’s Musicophilia in Mumbai

Tejaswini NIRANJANA, KIM Soyoung, CHOW Yiu Fai, IP Kimho, Andy Chih-Ming WANG, Meaghan MORRIS

ABSTRACT  Tejaswini Niranjana is one of the important Indian cultural theorists. In Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious, she examines the emergence of Hindustani classical music in Mumbai, bringing together the notions of sociality and subjectivity to throw light on an important aspect of how publics are formed in the non-western metropolis. The roundtable joined by Professor Niranjana and the other five scholars touches upon issues such as the metropolitan unconscious, musicophilia, and migratory cultures, while also discussing the question of teacher-student relationship, the importance of inter-referencing and the possibility of creating new spaces of discussion.

KEYWORDS: Musicophilia; Hindustani music; metropolitan unconscious; musical subject; musical public; teacher-student relationship

Notes on speakers

Tejaswini Niranjana is currently Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and author of Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad, published by Duke University Press, and Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. From August 2021, she will be Director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research, Ahmedabad University, India.

Soyoung Kim is Professor of Cinema studies, Director of Trans Asia Screen Culture Institute, Korea National university of Arts, Author of several books on postcolonial modernity and gender including Korean Cinema in Global Contexts (forthcoming, Amsterdam University Press), Filmmaker of Exile trilogy and Women’s History Trilogy.

Chow Yiu Fai is Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University. His publications cover gender politics and creative practices, including Caring in the Time of Precarity: A Study of Single Women Doing Creative Work in Shanghai (Palgrave 2019) and Sonic Multiplicities: Hong Kong Pop and the Global Circulation of Sound and Image (Intellect 2013, co-authored). Chow is also an award-winning writer in lyrics and prose.

Ip Kimho received his Doctoral degree in 2004 at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is fellow of DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) in 1997. In 2011 and 2014 he has been invited to be Research Fellow at the International Research Centre, Interweaving Performance Culture at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His research in intercultural performance has been supported by the Scottish Arts Council and the Confucius Institute for Scotland at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently Associate Professor of Practice at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.

Chih-ming Wang is associate research fellow at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. He is also the author of Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America (University of Hawaii, 2013) and the co-editor (with Daniel PS Goh) of Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).

Meaghan Morris is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies, the University of Sydney, and former Chair Professor of Cultural Studies in Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Her current research is on martial arts cinema and her most recent book was Creativity and Academic Activism: Instituting Cultural Studies co-edited with Mette Hjort (2012).