Professor of Literary Studies, Kazi Nazrul University, India, and (currently) Institute of Language Studies and Research (ILSR), Kolkata, India
Duration of Stay
October – November 2022
In cooperation with Dr. Pavan Malreddy
Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha, currently with the School of Translation and Cultural Studies, Institute of Language Studies and Research (ILSR), Kolkata, India, is Professor in the Department of English and Co-coordinator of the Centre for Critical Social Inquiry at Kazi Nazrul University in India. He has been a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and visiting scholar at Institute for Critical Social Inquiry in the New School for Social Research in New York, and at Linnaeus University in Sweden, etc. Anindya’s current research focuses on postcolonial literature and cultural practices, critical theory, violence and citizenship rights. He is one of the founding members of the Postcolonial Studies Association of the Global South (PSAGS).
Research Project Title
»Anarchiving Social Change: Black Reason, Caste Conflicts and the Postcolonial Imperative«
Research abstract
During my research fellowship stay, together with Pavan Kumar Malreddy, I will continue to work on our joint book project »Anarchiving Social Change: Black Reason, Caste Conflicts and the Postcolonial Imperative«. Focusing on ideologies of conflict and hate, built around systems of caste, ethnic and racial discriminations, this book revisits how B. R. Ambedkar and W. E. B. DuBois, two prominent early twentieth century thinker-activists, envisaged constitutionalism and principles of social »endosmosis« as possible means of dialogue, social justice and inter-community trust building. Examining conventional definitions of the archive, this study explores the possibility of a more effective discourse of »anarchiving« that historicizes the present in such a way so that potential spaces of subject formation and social critique can be fortified for future. (Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha)
Publications (selection)
(ed. with Saswat Samay Das), Deleuze and Guattari and Terror, Edinburgh University Press 2022.
(co-authored with Manas Dutta and Tirthankar Ghosh), Social Movements, Media and Civil Society in Contemporary India: Historical Trajectories of Public Protest and Political Mobilisation, Palgrave Macmillan 2022.
Literature, Cultural Politics and Counter-Readings: Hamlet As the Prince of Deconstruction, Routledge and Aakar Books 2021.
(ed. with Pavan Malreddy and Birte Heidemann), Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives, Routledge 2020.
Events
Lecture on October 26, 2022: Postcolonial perspectives on conflict and trust building. Tolerance, Fratricidal Violence and Samata: Critical Anarchives of Nazrul, Ambedkar and W.E.B. DuBois. Link