Leela Prasad
Assistant Professor of Religion
"Displayed Images & the Public Imaginary: Reflections from an Exhibition of Indian American Life in Philadelphia"
Monday, November 28
12pm
Lecture Description
In 1999, Prof. Prasad guest-curated and
conducted ethnographic research for an exhibition on Indian
American life in Philadelphia, editing and contributing to its
catalogue of essays,
‘Live Like the Banyan Tree’:
Images of the Indian American Experience. She also
co-directed a video documentary called
Back and Forth: Two
Generations of Indian Americans at Home. This lecture draws
from those earlier projects and extends them in a new direction to
explore how images of time and space associated with “ethnicity”
and “diaspora” are created, reflected, and mediated upon in the
public imaginary. Parts of Prof. Prasad's documentary
Back and
Forth will be screened.
About the Speaker
Prof. Prasad received her PhD in Folklore and
Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. While her
primary interest is in Hindu ethics and its expressive dimensions,
her research areas include colonial and postcolonial anthropology
of Indian religions, folklore, narrative, gender, and the South
Asian diaspora. She recently completed
Poetics of Conduct:
Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town (forthcoming
from Columbia University Press), an ethnographic exploration of
relationships between oral narrative, moral identity, and the
poetics of everyday language in Sringeri, a pilgrimage town in
South India. She has co-edited and written the introduction for
Gender and Story in India, a volume on women-performed
narratives in different cultural and linguistic settings of South
India (SUNY Press, forthcoming 2006). Her book-in-progress,
The
Folklore Project: Ethnography and Religion in India, 1860 –1920
uncovers the remarkable contributions of Indian folklore collectors
who have largely remained eclipsed for nearly a century, and
considers linkages between nineteenth-century folklore collection
and modern anthropological discourse relating to Indian religions.
Leela is fluent in the Indian languages of Kannada, Telugu,
Marathi, and Hindi.
Currently, she is a Fellow at the John Hope Franklin Humanities
Institute, where she is undertaking a new work that extends her
earlier projects -- ethnographic, curatorial, documentary -- on the
Indian American diaspora (more details in "Lecture Description"
above).
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