Iqbal Centre and AIMES Annual Lecture 2022
Mediated Desires: Community and Sect in Modern South Asia
Speaker: Dr Ali Altaf Mian (University of Florida)
Abstract: This talk will explore the relationship between modern sexuality and the regime of capitalist individualism, looking specifically at how the colonialist emphasis on community and sect foreclosed the materialization of individualism among South Asian Muslims. It will also examine how Muslims in colonial India used modern technologies to generate community and sect and how contemporary Muslims in South Asia and the diaspora use social media to consolidate their communal and sectarian identities in response to the trauma of eros precipitated by the inundation of pornographic and semi-pornographic images in contemporary digital media. The talk addresses these questions by bringing together Lacanian psychoanalysis, biopolitical critique, and post-colonial theory, illuminating the historical conditions behind the widening gaps between mediated desires in traditionalist Islam and those in secular queer culture.
Date: March 14 2022
Time: 17:00-18:30
Place: Michael Sadler LG.19
