Kiran Sunar gives a working paper on 'Religious Individualization Through Religious Transformation: Rethinking Conversion and Disguise in Bhai Vīr Singh’s Sundarī'

This paper navigates questions of religious transformation in Sikh Punjabi writer Bhai Vīr Singh’s 1898 novel Sundarī. The text offers insight into the necessity for continued reengagement of the  conceptual ideas of religious purity and fluidity in South Asian religious traditions in the colonial period. I sketch the complexity of religious transformations in Sundarī, arguing that religious transformation, defined as conversion and as disguise, offer not only sites of religious conversation, but also spaces for questions of political and situational allegiance to emerge in a landscape that was undergoing immense flux. My questions are: how does religious transformation operate at the level of conversion and disguise in the text? How are these various transformations depicted and what can they tell us about colonial Punjab’s engagement with the making of religion? I argue that in Bhai Vīr Singh’s Sundarī, we see a marked capacity for Sikh bodies to transform at the same time that we see a strongly developed sense of Sikh identity.

Genuine Pretending and Prolificity - two projects presented by Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio

Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio presented their recently published book to a seminar at the MWK today:

Genuine Pretending. On the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi, Columbia University Press, New York 2017.

New book:

Profilicity: Notes on the Problem of Identity

Are we in an age of diminished authenticity and on the rise of genuine pretending as a new paradigm of identity construction? We surely move from a first order observation to what Luhmann called second order observation, hence move away from what we are or want to be and go to how one wants to be seen, liked ...

The project makes use of Chinese philosophy of the Confucian classics of the Zhuangzi and pertains to the discussion of sincerity vs. authenticity.