The Punjabi Literary Formation: Language and Affect in a Vernacular Culture

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the Department of Asian Studies at UBC as part of the 2nd Annual Celebration of Punjabi in honour of the memory of Harjit K. Sidhu, Professor Farina Mir explores the contours of a colonial-era “Punjabi literary formation” in India. That is, those individuals who shared in the practices of producing, circulating, performing, and consuming Punjabi literary texts. She will argue that the Punjabi literary formation’s pragmatic engagements with colonial institutions were far less important than the affective attachments its adherents established with a place, with an old but dynamic corpus of stories, and with the moral sensibility that suffused those stories.Liu Institute for Global IssuesArts, Faculty ofUnreviewedGraduat