CRITICAL & VISUAL STUDIES : 2015

Hyphenated Identities / Discourses, Questions, and Polemics

HYPHENATED IDENTITIES / DISCOURSES, QUESTIONS, AND POLEMICS conference Please join the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies and the Memory Studies Group at the New School for Social Research, the East Central European Center of Columbia University, and the Yiddish Studies Program, and Polish Studies at Columbia University, for a conference on hyphenated identities. Our inspiration was Horace M. Kallen, Jewish-American philosopher and one...

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CritViz Holiday Party and Potluck Contest

Announcement 11:41 AM

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Please join the CritViz program on Friday, December 4th, 6:30-10:30 for a Holiday Party and Potluck Contest! Bring a dish and vote for your favorites. The top 2 submissions receive a holiday prize! The event will be held at During/Poole's at 129 Pacific St, First Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201. Please RSVP to Katie Kelley at kkelle10@pratt.edu. Pratt InstituteMain Brooklyn Campus 200 Willoughby Avenue,...

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Critical and Visual Studies Lunch and Presentation with Andrea Průchová

Announcement 11:02 AM

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Please join the Crit Viz program, coordinators, and students on Tuesday, November 17 at 12:30 in Dekalb 308 for a lunch featuring a talk from our visiting Fulbright Scholar, Andrea Průchová! WHAT NEXT? Critical & Visual Studies in Public Pedagogy Andrea Pruchova, Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Charles University in Prague Pratt Institute, Brooklyn Campus Tuesday November 17th, 12:30 PM Dekalb 308 Critical & Visual Studies visiting scholar...

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The BA in Critical and Visual Studies at Pratt

Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies 11:04 AM

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Critical and Visual Studies is a Bachelor of Arts program for the curious and imaginative student who wants to pursue studies in the liberal arts and sciences while immersed in Pratt’s unique environment of creative openness and intellectual experimentation. We believe that the liberal arts and sciences bring vitality, creativity, and practical application to intellectual practice. At the core of the program is...

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Francis R. Bradley, "Forging Islamic Power and Place: The Legacy of Shaykh Daud bin ‘Abd Allah al-Fatani in Mecca and Southeast Asia"

Announcement 11:04 AM

Forging Islamic Power and Place charts the nineteenth-century rise of a vast network of Islamic scholars stretching across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to Arabia. He makes use of an impressive range of sources, including official colonial documents, traveler accounts, missionary writings, and above all a trove of handwritten manuscripts in Malay and Arabic, what remains of one of the most fertile zones of knowledge production anywhere in the Islamic world at the time. Writing against prevailing notions of Southeast Asia as the passive recipient of the Islamic traditions of the Middle East, Bradley shows how a politically marginalized community engineered its own cultural renaissance via the moral virility of the Islamic scholarly tradition and the power of the written word. He highlights how, in an age of rising colonial power, these knowledge producers moved largely unnoticed and unhindered between Southeast Asia and the Middle East carrying out sweeping cultural and religious change. His focus on Thailand’s so-called “deep south,” which has been marginalized in scholarly studies until recent times, helps lay the groundwork for a new generation of scholarship on the region and furthers our understanding of the present-day crisis in southern Thailand.

Biography

Francis (Cisco) Bradley is a scholar of social and cultural history set in diverse contexts. Throughout his career, his interests have settled on the historical agency exhibited by people marginalized by global or local forces who face myriad challenges including dislocation, cultural destruction, social alienation, or structural or physical violence. This has led him to investigate histories in a variety of contexts including port cities, mobile intellectual or artist communities, and inhabitants of maritime settings, where people are stitched together through viable, if vulnerable social networks of their own making.
His academic work has focused on mobility and networks in maritime or trans-regional settings with early articles appearing in Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and Journal of the Siam Society that focus on movement, dislocation, social genesis, and piracy. He explores these issues deeply in his first book, entitledForging Islamic Power and Place: The Legacy of Shaykh Da'ud bin 'Abd Allah al-Fatani in Mecca and Southeast Asia, which is in press with University of Hawaii Press. The affiliated website is: www.patanistudies.com. Bradley is also working to build a comprehensive bibliography on piracy studies which is publicly available atwww.wordpress.com/piracystudies.

Since settling in Brooklyn, Professor Bradley has added a new sub-field to his myriad interests, that of the history of avant garde jazz in Brooklyn. This project has led him to study the underbelly of New York City, gentrification, structural violence, and avant garde art forms and how they relate to a far-flung, diverse, globally-drawn community ofartists and their social and cultural networks. His website www.jazzrightnow.com chronicles much of his work in this regard.

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