Why Minority Discourses?

This academic year, the department felt the need to organize a national seminar that would integrate the sheer force of our varied encounters as Indian academicians and researchers with issues of marginalisation in India. Departments across the length and breadth of our universities, research institutions and organizations, N.G.Os and action groups continue to address issues of caste and gender, the status of  religious, linguistic and political minorities, native cultures, indigenous narratives and numerous identities that are relegated to abjecthood and thereby to the periphery of an assumed cohesive central social order. The National Seminar on “Understanding Minority discourses in India”, slated for 12 & 13 January 2015, is a singular attempt at addressing the pluralism of our subaltern narratives as a nation without blurring the specificities of oppression that give rise to revolutions of resistance.

Concept Note

'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?