Event
Islam in the Tamil World
Co-sponsored by the South Asia Center, Department of South Asian Studies, and Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania
This two-day workshop explores the modern textual, visual, material, and somatic traditions of Muslim communities in the Tamil world, a linguistic sphere of shared social, cultural, and intellectual practices stretching from South India to Southeast Asia and South Africa. With a temporal focus on the modern period, the workshop hopes to appraise and map the archives available for the study of Islam in the Tamil world. The workshop will respond to important intellectual themes such as transnationalism and print culture in the Indian Ocean littoral, "vernacular" and "classical" encounters in poetic and prose forms (Islamic, Arabic, Tamil, religious, secular literatures or any combination thereof), epistemologies of religiosity (ritual life, shrine culture, music, pilgrimage), and Islamic life in colonial modernity (theological reform, histories of colonial labor, diasporic culture).
Participants must pre-register for this event.