Debjani Ganguly

Pigments of the Imagination: Theorising, Performing and Historicising Mixed Race

On 28 August 2006, Time published an article called ‘‘Diving into the Gene Pool’’ by Carolina Miranda. Miranda, a Latin American by birth and a resident of New York, decided to test her genetic make up by approaching a company specialising in personal DNA analysis. Of mixed Peruvian and Chilean background, she anticipated that the tests would show her to be of mixed European and American Indian descent. She was totally unprepared for the results. Number One on her list of roots was subSaharan African, followed by southern European and Native American. The results also indicated that she shared genetic codes with people from Belarus, Poland and Mozambique. Miranda’s bemused reaction to her highly mixed racial heritage is pertinent even as it is funny:

Pain, Personhood and the Collective: Dalit Life Narratives

Abstract Dalit life narratives have gained prominence in the last two decades in line with the increasing visibility of Dalits in the Indian public sphere and their vociferous demands for a more just political and social order. This can be productively situated not just in the contemporary global context of the proliferation of narratives and testimonios of human rights violations in other parts of the world, but also in the context of an emerging conversation on the nature of “Dalit personhood” in the Indian public sphere, a category infinitely more complex than legal subjectivity and abstract citizenship. The Dalit narratives analysed here are rich illustrations of this double movement: they witness on behalf of a suffering community and keep alive the singular, non-universal nature of Dalit pain through an aesthetic that is not wholly translatable into the lexicon of rights and justice. By invoking the historical and rhetorical force of two prose fictional genres, the Bildungsroman and the picaresque, the analysis has sought to recast the testimonio less as a proxy for the legal witnessing and amelioration of Dalit pain than as a rich and expressive medium of Dalit personhood. This way of reading Dalit lives accords Indias ex-untouchables a stature beyond that of victims at the mercy of the capricious sentimentality of upper-caste solidarity.

Limits of the Human

Modernity defines its civilisation and epoch, its political desires and ethical norms through the value and meaning of being human. It is in terms of the rights, needs and nature of a common humanity that universal laws are conceived as valid and true. Today, however, the very concept of the human appears to be in crisis as we acknowledge our collective agency in precipitating a slide towards a catastrophic future for our planet, or register the aporias of the international human rights regime in the face of the multitudinous sites of geopolitical conflict and violence that have succeeded the Cold War. As the fundamentals of ethics are challenged by the anticipation of a post-human future, whether of an intelligence explosion, an event horizon termed ‘‘singularity’’ by the futurist Ray Kurzweil, or of a biologically re-engineered human subject enabled by advances in the human genome project and the technologies of mammal cloning, we face a pressing need to recalibrate for our times the conceptual weight that the category of the human has acquired over two centuries of critical reflection and representation. This special issue of Angelaki orients itself to a climate of contemporary critical thought that originates in the contemplation of such limit cases. At once sober, tremulous, wondrous, and inventive, such thought takes the measure of humanity’s presence on this planet. It weighs the human capacity for transcendence with its predilection for annihilation. It ponders the fate of our non-human others, not just animals and living organisms but inert matter; and contemplates the fields of techno-mediation of suffering lifeworlds that constitute new public realms of visibility. Startlingly, it scales up human historicity to mark our intervention in geological space-time, thus heralding a new Earth era, the Anthropocene, a term that gives ominous credence to the indelible imprint of the human on our biophysical systems. If in ecological perspective, the human has become an element so disjoint with nature that it threatens to bring many forms and species of life to the threshold of extinction, then it may seem that all that has inspired modernity’s self-conception as progressive, humane and historically necessary proves instead to have been an unmonitored and dangerous experiment with life’s very conditions of possibility. The same thought may apply to our encounter with the limits of the human in global media images of extreme violence. The differential impact of crisis and suffering, giving rise to EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

Buddha, bhakti and superstition: a post‐secular reading of dalit conversion

This essay is an attempt to formulate ways of writing a revisionary ethnography of a religious conversion movement among a community of ex-untouchable castes, called Mahars in India, from the point of view of recent theoretical developments in the field of postcolonial studies. It can be read as a dialogue with that strand of postcolonial theory called ‘radical’ by Simon During, that seeks alternative ways of conceptualising modernity based on non-Western traditions and life-worlds, without being nativist or reductive in any way. The essay constitutes part of a larger project on representations of caste that I am engaged in at the moment and that situates itself as a critique of the prevalent social scientific and activist ethnographic readings of caste that invest deeply in a vision of secular modernity. The social sciences, especially in the context of South Asia, have broadly conceptualised caste as a relic of pre-modern times and as something that is responsible for retarding India’s progress towards ‘full’ modernity. Thus, in the mid-1990s, a political economist in India could write, ‘Despite sweeping changes in economic policy the caste system is unlikely to wither away and ... at least in the short term, is likely to slow down the pace of economic reforms’. In my project I argue that caste is not so much an essence responsible for South Asia’s backwardness, as a constellation of variegated social practices that are in a constant state of flux and that cannot be completely contained within a narrative of nation-building, modernisation and development. The need to challenge the conceptual legislation of the social sciences over caste studies lies in the fact that the caste Hindu and dalit habitus generate complex heterotemporal modalities of living. The secular, rationalist orientation of the social sciences cannot begin to contain all such modalities. To that extent, my reading of caste practices in this essay is underpinned by a phenomenological apprehension of caste as ‘life-form’, as an assemblage of secular and non-secular practices that generate and regenerate everyday life in South Asia. It suggests that we should be sensitive to those dimensions of caste-based, non-secular life-forms that continue to be forged in languages/registers long since delegitimated as ‘backward’ or ‘pre-modern’ by the paraphernalia of political modernity and societal modernisation. In short, the essay as a whole argues for ways of conceptualising life-forms generated by caste on the subcontinent that are not available to the rational, systemic, disembodied, public self of the modern social scientist.

Literary globalism in the new millennium

Among the many factors that have changed the practice of literary study . . . one of the more consequential is the realisation, now gaining ever-wider recognition throughout the discipline, that the object of knowledge in literary studies is situated within a vastly broadened network of intertextual relations that is potentially transnational and cross-cultural and that requires for its interpretation and assessment methods that are often mixed, if not interdisciplinary.

Global literary refractions: Reading Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters in the post-Cold War era

This article critically examines Pascale Casanovas recent theorization of the world literary space from the point of view of postcolonial and especially post-Cold War debates on global literary comparativism. It investigates whether her Bourdieu-derived ‘field’ approach, with its overwhelming conceptual dependence on ‘market’ and ‘nation’ metaphors, equips her to make valid qualitative judgements on vast swathes of ‘non-European’ and ‘transnational’ literary spaces. In annexing all literatures of the non-European, postcolonial world to a historiography of European literatures, Casanovas book, this article argues, is not well positioned to theorize contemporary forms of literary ‘worldling’ where Europe is but one node among many others and scarcely the ‘Greenwich Meridian’ of literary taste. Finally, the article discusses alternative ways of studying world literary spaces and histories that have emerged in recent years, especially in the works of David Damrosch and Franco Moretti. In the process, it also weaves in aspects of a post-1989 Anglophone world literature project the theoretical and geopolitical assumptions of which are in quite some tension with those of Casanovas book.

From Empire to Empire? Writing the Transnational Anglo-Indian Self in Australia

This paper situates late modern Anglo-Indian lifeworlds in Australia in a dialogue with the theoretical templates of globalisation and postcolonialism. More particularly it deploys contemporary Anglo-Indian life stories to challenge theoretical positions in the domain of globalisation studies that announce either the demise of postcolonial theory (by suggesting that it has outlived its historical viability) or subsume its varied articulations under the rubric of “globalisation”. Both positions find their voice in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri co-authored Empire (2000). I take up the challenge posed to postcolonialism by Hardt and Negri by asking how they would theorise a mode of hybrid belonging in a globalised world that has a long colonial history of racial and cultural mixing and that is not just a by-product of late capitalisms global generation of difference. Such a mode of belonging is manifest in the Anglo-Indian community now residing in the Anglophone countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK. The Anglo-Indian narratives deployed in this analysis are seen as exemplary in addressing the theoretical links between postcolonialism and globalisation. They also unravel global capitals false rhetoric of an even playing field of ever proliferating difference and mixedness.

Deathworlds, the World Novel and the Human

Foundational to the English novel in the eighteenth century was a narrative grammar of the human structured around two ideas: sympathy and sovereignty. Linking these two were deliberations on the role of technology in determining the reach and extent of the sympathetic imagination. This essay reprises the novel’s historical links with distant suffering and technologies of mediation – the staple of debates on the sentimental novel and the rise of Abolitionism in the late eighteenth century – in the context of the emergence of a critical mass of world novels written against the backdrop of post-1989 sites of geopolitical carnage. New media technologies and multiple visual regimes have been critical in mediating these deathworlds for diverse publics around the world. What changes, I ask, are being wrought on the narrative grammar of the human in the novel form in this era of spectatorial capitalism where the capacity to respond to distant suffering has increased manifold with advances in information technology?

The Subaltern after Subaltern Studies: Genealogies and Transformations

Few scholars of my generation with an interest in South Asian and Post-Colonial Studies have escaped the influence of Subaltern Studies. Many of us chose a research trajectory that fortuitously offered opportunities to work in proximity with members of the Subaltern Studies collective. By the time I began my graduate work on caste and Dalit studies at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra in the late 1990s, Ranajit Guha had already stepped down as editor of Subaltern Studies and his celebrated six volumes had become part of global academic lore. Reading these volumes as a fresh college lecturer in Mumbai in the early 1990s played no small part in my decision to undertake my graduate training in Canberra. Guha, after all, was based at ANU as a senior research fellow at the erstwhile Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS). He had moved there in 1980 from the UK and lived in Canberra for the next two decades, in effect conferring on ANU the distinction of being the academic home from which the classic volumes of Subaltern Studies emanated—a fact, perhaps, little known to a new generation of post-colonial scholars globally. Dipesh Chakrabarty, an alumnus of ANU, had already moved to the University of Chicago. But he had a visiting appointment at the Humanities Research Centre that adjoined the Literature Department in ANU’s famous A.D. Hope Building. Given my disciplinary base in the literature programme, I soon got to meet them both through formal introductions by the chair of my panel, Jon Mee. I vividly remember my first meeting with Dipesh Chakrabarty the week I arrived from India in 1997. Jon, Dipesh and I walked to the Calypso cafe and I tried my best to hide my trepidation at meeting the famous historian. I had just read his ‘Marx After Marxism’ in the Melbourne journal, Meanjin, that my friend, Sudesh Mishra, had recommended as a classic Dipesh piece—all spark and brilliance. Having come into adulthood in the late 1980s in Mumbai, the hub of India’s industrial finance entertainment complex, Marxism was never on my intellectual horizon in the way it was for Dipesh’s generation in a radicalised Kolkata. The Maoist rebellions of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Bengal were but a faint and disconcerting family memory for me, with my IPS-trained maternal uncle from the West Bengal Police being one of the key law enforcers standing against the ‘naxals’—as the Maoist rebels were called in my mother tongue, Bengali. I grew

Review of curators Divia Patel, Rebecca Bower and Christine Sumner’s Cinema India – The Art of Bollywood, Powerhouse Museum

Debjani Ganguly of the Australian National University reviews curators Divia Patel, Rebecca Bower and Christine Sumner’s Cinema India – The Art of Bollywood , Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, NSW. 6 June – 11 November 2007. Entry: free with entry to museum: Adults