In and Out of the Cultural Spaces: Politics and Aesthetics of Diaspora (Comparative Nepali Studies)

Preamble

How do you look into a particular issue from the locations of home and abroad? How do things look different through spatial oscillation?  What is an aesthetic perception about Nepal from a distance? What political concepts do we form when our locations are changed? Keeping these questions in mind, we welcome Nepali academics, professionals, artists, businesspersons, and students who are ‘living abroad’ to engage with us on various issues like pedagogy, notions of vernacular and global concerns, urbanism, folk memory, Nepal, and the outside in general. How do our ‘outside’ selves see us? ‘In and Out’ is a traveling metaphor of the speaking subjects who are always on the threshold between home and abroad, in the creative magical dailo between the two worlds that never are distinctly two worlds. We probably never cross the threshold. The traveling metaphor within the threshold is a double bind of moving in and out, in an oscillation of: presence and absence, home and abroad, journey out and reminiscing mind in. Let us presume that this is a liminal space, which constantly evokes the mind to speak about the space that you have never left by journeying out. The idea of In and Out of the Cultural Spaces: Politics and Aesthetics of Diaspora is a Comparative Nepali Studies project that invites you to speak in webinars, help us publish a journal, a series of anthologies, and work on the archives.  We will be honored to have you participate. SAFAR and CASSA research team is going to organize the program.