Northeast India, located on India's periphery, is a region whose socio-cultural world exhibits more similarities with Southeast Asia region than with that of South Asia. Such perceptive characterisation of the Northeast region, however, has had been scuttled by the constricted imagination induced by the nation-state paradigm and related ways of writing history. The uncritical reliance on colonial discourse to understand the region reinforces the colonial conceptions while simultaneously marginalising the cultural-historical legacy of resident communities. This has led to the creation of an idea of an insular (Northeast) region on the one hand while reinforcing the image of India as the mainland constitutive of a larger Indic/ South Asian culture on the other.
The proposed conference seeks to question this entrenched way of understanding Northeast India by way of situating it contiguously with Southeast and East Asia. In doing so, it will take a multi disciplinary look at lived reality, insider perspectives and experiences of transformation to identify the threads of interconnectedness between these regions. The conference will thus highlight the inter-regionality of Northeast India while culturally positioning it in a larger Southeast/East Asian tradition.
Abstract Submission Deadline: 30th January 2018.