On Cruelty: Global Reflections from the Age of Revolutions to the War on Citizenship

Date
Fri October 30th 2015, 12:00am
Location
Stanford Humanities Center
On Cruelty: Global Reflections from the Age of Revolutions to the War on Citizenship
On Cruelty: Global Reflections from the Age of Revolutions to the War on Citizenship
 
This is the second meeting of the workshop series on Civility, Cruelty, Truth. A one-day event hosted by the Stanford Humanities Center, the workshop will explore the genealogies, promises, and limits of civic virtue—at the heart of which is the city, the classical polis, itself— as a universal ideal. European in its moral contours, constituted by a deep fascination with the rule of law, borders, and security, at once coercive and oblique in whom it excludes and includes, how it punishes and protects, the city held out the promise of a humane center for ethical and sovereign life, one upon which anticolonial struggles against European empires too were first conceived and mounted. This workshop will examine the ambiguous foundations and resolutions of that vision in Asia, Europe, and the fatal waters in between; a vision that has come to be marked today by extreme violence and tragic displacements, and which now presses new questions against the very limit of modern political imagination.
 
Faculty Organizer: Aishwary Kumar (Department of History)
Student Assistant: Ahoo Najafian (Department of Religious Studies)
 

Schedule

9:00 Opening Remarks     

Robert Crews and Aishwary Kumar (Stanford University)

 

Session I The Moral Universe

9:15     David Bromwich (Yale University) “Edmund Burke on Cruelty in British India”

 

9:45     Vinayak Chaturvedi (University of California, Irvine) “Hindutva and the Need for Cruelty”

 

Discussant: Alison McQueen (Stanford University)

 

11:00   Coffee Break

 

Session II Responsibility and Judgement

11:15   Ayten Gundogdu (Barnard College, Columbia University) “When Compassion Turns Cruel: Arendtian Reflections on the Paradoxes of Humanitarianism”

 

11:45   James P. Daughton (Stanford University) “Cruelty's Humanity: The Many Faces of French Colonial Humanitarianism”

 

Discussant: Kabir Tambar (Stanford University)

 

13:00   Lunch at the Humanities Center for all participants

 

Session III  The Grammar of Cruelty

14:15  Uday Singh Mehta (The Graduate Center, CUNY) “The Logic of Cruelty and the Logic of Violence”

 

14:45  Kelly Grotke (Cornell University) “Universalism and Cruelty: The History of Europe and the Challenges of Syria”

 

Discussant: Ian Zuckerman (Stanford University)

 

16:00   Coffee Break

 

Final Reflections

 

16:15-17:00     Aishwary Kumar (Stanford University)

 

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, Department of Religious Studies, The Europe Center, The France- Stanford Center for interdisciplinary Studies, Program in Global Justice, McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford Global Studies, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford Humanities Center, Center for South Asia