Post-graduate Seminar / Oberseminar

2 December 2019, 18.00-20.00, Room L-155
Institut für Ethnologie
Oettingenstrasse 67

This time we cordially invite you to two presentations:

Dr. des. Max Kramer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

Communication Ethics and Social Media within Indian Reformist Islam

In this presentation, I will explore the communication ethics of social media use by a few key members of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Hind. I will refer to the writings of Sadatullah Hussaini, the current president of the organization, and to interviews conducted with Arshad Shaikh, the media in-charge at the central office in New Delhi. I will highlight some of the crucial features and frames of their ethical thought and practice. Finally, I will relate this ethical theory and practice to the transatlantic field of global digital media ethics to point out some intertextual relations, similarities, differences, and contradictions.

Dr. Salma Siddique (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

The Matryoshka Effect: Political Revelations in Digital Technologies

The online creative practice of female blogger Nabila Pathan produces narratives for and about the British Indian Muslim diaspora through two genres – comedy and travelogue. Shaped by the history and political experience of their land of origins, her diasporic characters work through their British lives as objections that disrupt the hegemonic narrative that frames them. It is here that questions of political inclusion, citizenship and belonging are posed against the forces of Islamophobia, racism and colonial memory. Yet at the same time, her assembly of characters, each played by Nabila herself, reveal the conflicts – generational, racial, class-based, caste-based – internal to the diasporic community. Summoned as a narrative resource and an online community in Nabila’s practice, the British Indian Muslims appear as constituted out of the trauma of colonial encounters, fragmentation and dispersal. What is also revealed is a political jadedness as far as their investment in Indian national politics is concerned. Can this be called the memory of a ‘biominority’? Could Nabila’s practice as a first generation British Indian Muslim, though dominantly pertaining to her life in Britain, contain the memory of a changing power arrangement in their native country? Does the ethnography of the diasporic Indian Muslim necessitate an archaeology of the colonial Indian Muslim? These are some of the questions that I investigate in this paper.

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