1st Edition
Climate Change and Cultural Practices in South Asia
Introduction: Climate Change and Cultural Practices in South Asia
Iftikhar Dadi, Sarah Besky, Rupali Gupte, and Sonal Khullar
Part I Epistemologies
Chapter 1 Silt, Dredge, Embankment, Pond: Taxonomies of a Delta Dispositif
Jason Cons
Chapter 2 Misreading Climate Change and Sea Level Rise: An Environmental History of Embankments and Floods in Bangladesh
Camelia Dewan
Chapter 3 Socio-environmental Imbrications and Epistemological Borderlands in Mumbai’s Mangrove Landscapes
Aparna Parikh
Chapter 4 Movement Artifacts and Academic Exclusion: Daira
Ahsan Kamal
Part II Lineages
Chapter 5 El Niños and the Architecture of Drought: The Dig Experiment
Sugata Ray
Chapter 6 Messenger Poems and the Cultural Politics of Migration: Monsoon Media
Debashree Mukherjee
Chapter 7 Impermanence, Repair, and Practices of Habitation in South Asia: A Pedagogy of Life
Rupali Gupte
Part III Transformations
Chapter 8 Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Change Adaptation in Uzma Khan’s Thinner than Skin: Reading Ice
Saba Pirzadeh
Chapter 9 Climate Translations and the Nonhuman in Contemporary Indian Media
Nayanika Mathur
Chapter 10 Burst Pipes, Developmental Hubris, and Dissident Art in an Unnamed City
Parismita Singh
Chapter 11 The Country and the City in the Himalaya
Sarah Besky
Part IV Practices
Chapter 12 The Complexities of “Climate Migration” in Mustang, Nepal
Emily T. Yeh
Chapter 13 Mediatic Environments of Resistance and Imagination
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
Chapter 14 Towards Architectures of Exfoliation
Rohit Mujumdar
Chapter 15 Climate Crisis in Contemporary Bangladeshi Architecture: Living on the Estuary
Farhan Karim
Afterword
Iftikhar Dadi
Biography
Iftikhar Dadi is the John H. Burris Professor of Cornell University’s Department of History of Art. He has authored Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable (2022), Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010), and edited the Lahore Biennale 01 Reader (2022) and Anwar Jalal Shemza (2015). He has co-edited the Lahore Biennale 02 Reader (2024) and Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination: Turkey, Pakistan, and Their European Diasporas (2023).
Sarah Besky is Professor of the Anthropology of Work in the ILR School at Cornell University and the author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (2014), Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (2020), and How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (2019, co-edited with Alex Blanchette). Articles have appeared in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Antipode, and Environmental Humanities.
Rupali Gupte is an architect, urbanist, and artist, and a founding member, Professor, and Director at the School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai. Her interdisciplinary work engages South Asian architecture and urbanism, urban form, housing, repair, gender, and spatial practices through writing, drawing, installations, curation, and spatial interventions. Her recent publications focus on pedagogies of spatial justice, the theorization of small forces that shape cities, and the reconceptualization of housing as “inhabitation” in South Asia.
Sonal Khullar is the W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity and Modernism in India, 1930-1990 (2015) and editor of Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia (2023). Her monograph The Art of Dislocation: Conflict and Collaboration in Contemporary Art from South Asia will be published in 2027.
"Imaginative artworks and projects engaging with monsoon rains, rivers, mangroves, dams, and other environmental actors create a vital lens for confronting climate change in South Asia, a region that bears its severest brunt. Multi-national, multi-disciplinary, and historically conscious, this volume demonstrates the importance of the humanities and the arts in understanding and acting upon the most urgent environmental crises of our age."
-- Esra Akcan, Professor, Department of Architecture, Cornell University
"Climate Change and Cultural Practices in South Asia is a welcome addition to the environmental humanities of the Global South. Its focus on human creativity explores a neglected dimension of the experience of climate change. Its attention to topographies, materialities, and mediatic forms is innovative in bringing forward the formal qualities of the creative expressions that climate change has already engendered.
-- Naveeda Khan, Professor, Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University
"I read the essays collected in Climate Change and Cultural Practices in South Asia with intense interest and deep admiration. They demonstrate that responding to ecological devastation requires locally grounded practices shaped by human creativity, intellectual rigor, and cross-border collaboration. Committed to a pedagogy of life, this volume offers a generous invitation to learn, rethink, and imagine more just futures."
-- Elke Krasny, Professor for Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Co-editor of Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet.
