Cornell University

Central Campus

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Talk by Du Fei (History, Cornell University)

How would India’s connected histories look like if viewed from a gendered perspective? This presentation examines Muslim women’s participation in the local and transregional economic exchanges of the Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds that converged in India from the height of Mughal rule in the seventeenth century to the consolidation of the British colonial state in the nineteenth century. Based on a wide array of archives in Persian, Arabic, Urdu, English, and Dutch, this presentation will show that Muslim women from merchant and landholding families played constitutive roles in sustaining an economy of mobility and a culture of circulation often seen as dominated by men. Muslim women’s negotiation with male kins, jurists, judges, and officials in seemingly mundane areas of Islamic law, especially inheritance and agency, thus defies any easy conceptions of the idea of patriarchy in Islam. Situated at the intersection of history, gender and sexuality studies, and Islamic studies, this project challenges existing gender-blind narratives of how trade and travel contributed to the making of global Islam in and beyond South Asia.

Du Fei is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Cornell University—his research centers on gender in South Asia’s global connections across the colonial divide. More broadly, his research interests include post-classical Islamic law, the history of capitalism, transnational feminism, digitization, and community archives. For 2023-25, Fei is a Junior Fellow in the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School. His published and forthcoming works can be found in Modern Asian Studies and Past & Present.

 

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