'Narrating Centres and Peripheries : Minority
Discourses in India', a National Seminar organized by the Department of
English, Christ University, integrates the varied encounters of Indian
academicians and researchers with issues of marginalisation in India. This
seminar aims to address the pluralism of our subaltern narratives as a nation,
issues of caste and gender, the status of religious, linguistic and political
minorities, native cultures, indigenous narratives and numerous identities that
are otherwise relegated to abjecthood and thereby to the periphery of an
assumed cohesive central social order. Minority Discourses continue to
underline social and cultural pluralism in the face of contemporary liberal
democratic societies that homogenize citizenship while simultaneously upholding
and practising dominant master-narratives privileging the majority. There is a
need to problematize the status of minorities, and also the concept of
'centres' and 'peripheries' and narrativise spaces that emerge from the resistance
to such categories. The seminar aims to negotiate with these narratives
vis-à-vis the following contemporary debates:
1. The expansive and enabling approach to
Minority Discourses as a space of collective consciousness that strengthens
both articulation and activism of empowerment for each of the communities in
mutual recognition of the experience of insubordination and dominance.
2. A close understanding of the specificities
of oppression influencing different minority communities in a bid to give voice
to the heterogeneous complexity of concerns and varied densities of reaction
and retaliation against dominant practices.
3. How do individuals belonging to minorities
engage in the process of social categorization as active subjects?
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