* Saturday April 24, 2010
* UBC Asian Centre Auditorium
* 1871 West Mall, UBC Vancouver
* 2-5:30 p.m.

2 p.m. Reception with tea/coffee
2:30-3:30: Lecture
3:30-4:30: Awards for student essay contest winners and honor to a local Punjabi writer
4:30-5:30: Student performances in Punjabi
(times are approximate)

Lecture:
The Punjabi Literary Formation: Language and Affect in a Vernacular Culture
Farina Mir, University of Michigan

Professor Mir will explore the contours of a colonial-era “Punjabi literary formation” in India, that is, those individuals who shared in the practices of producing, circulating, performing, and consuming Punjabi literary texts. She will argue that the Punjabi literary formation’s pragmatic engagements with colonial institutions were far less important than the affective attachments its adherents established with a place, with an old but dynamic corpus of stories, and with the moral sensibility that suffused those stories.

Farina Mir is currently Assistant Professor of history at the University of Michigan, where she teaches courses on early modern and modern South Asia. She holds degrees in English and Asian & Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures from Barnard College (B.A., 1993) and in history from Columbia University (Ph.D., 2002). Trained as a historian of colonial and postcolonial South Asia, her work focuses on the history of the Punjab. Her book The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (forthcoming from the University of California Press) is a study of the Punjabi literary tradition during the colonial period (from 1849 to 1947), with a particular focus on qisse or epic stories/romances. Mir has published in Comparative Studies in Society and History and the Indian Economic and Social History Review.

For more information, see http://www.asia.ubc.ca under “events.” Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia