DAC Rm. 206, Queens Campus
Title: Between the Colonial and the
Postcolonial: Indian Science, the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex,
and the Creation of INSAT
Abstract:
During the 1960s and early 1970s, an elite group of Indian
physicists established the basic institutional foundations of a
domestic Indian space program. The nascent “space” community
employed three rhetorical strategies to couch the effort to the
public, both as a way to insulate the effort from criticism and as
a means to differentiate it from the major Cold War space programs
of the Soviet Union and the United States. These characterizations
of the program—the principle of self-reliance, the potential
economic benefits to India’s poor, and the peaceful nature of the
effort—have remained inextricably linked to any public discussion
of the Indian space program. In practice, the Indian space program
embodied distinct counter currents to its constructed public
identity. In the early period, India benefited significantly from
foreign partners as a result of deliberate policy initiatives
inseparable from broader Cold War concerns. Dr. Siddiqi examines
this critical phase in the early development of the Indian space
program, when the professional aspirations of a rising scientific
elite in India came into conflict with foreign policy imperatives
related to the Cold War, and nationalistic rhetoric that privileged
the specificities of the post-colonial context.
Bio:
Dr. Asif Siddiqi is a professor in the history of science and
technology at Fordham University. His most recent book was The Red
Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957
(Cambridge, 2010). He is currently working on a book on
technological systems in the post-colonial context.
CLICK HERE TO RSVP TO THIS EVENT!!
Date: Thursday, February 21st,
2013
Time: 1:50 PM - 3:15 PM
Location: DAC Rm. 206, Queens
Campus
More Information
Susan Schmidt Horning
schmidts@stjohns.edu