The CUNY Graduate Center
Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2010-2011

The Postcolonial Studies Group presents:

Kandice Chuh
The Graduate Center, CUNY

How Monique Truong’s Book of Salt
is a 12th-century Novel

March 4th at 2 p.m.
CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5414
All are welcome.

In this talk, Chuh responds to the ways that the consequences of the nation:narration connection so compellingly argued by many scholars continues to shape critical inquiry and to invite metatextual consideration. The latter is perhaps particularly true given the currency of “postnational” (and, relatedly, “post-identity”) critique. Chuh observes that the contemporary interest in aesthetics and ethnic literatures may be seen as one facet of a broad critical interest in theorizing and grappling with “difference” in this putatively “post-national” era. As other critics are doing, Chuh attempts here to apprehend the impact of post-national critique through this turn to aesthetics, which effectively functions as a way of considering the centrality of the forms through which national identity has been apprehended. Put otherwise, given that nation and narration have been so intimately linked in postmodern/postcolonial cultural studies, especially through the investigation of the bildungsroman and the crucial importance that the concept of bildung has had in modern subject formation, Chuh asks, what forms might make the current practices of culture and politics and their organizing ideologies apprehensible? As narration is to nation, what form(s) or genre(s) is to post-nation? Here, she thinks through Monique Truong’s 2004 novel The Book of Salt, to consider the representative forms of modernity—sovereignty, subjectivity, and territoriality key among them, to pursue these questions of form.

Kandice Chuh is a professor in the PhD program in English at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she is affiliated to the Center for Globalization and Social Change. The author of Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique (2003), which won the American Studies Association’s Lora
Romero Book Prize, Chuh is also the co-editor, with Karen Shimakawa, of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001), and has published in such venues as Public Culture, American Literary History, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. Her current research involves aesthetic philosophies and theories, minority discourse, and globalization.

The CUNY Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016.
The Postcolonial Studies Group is a chartered organization of the Doctoral Students’ Council. Please visit our website at www.opencuny.org/psg

Questions? Email Fiona Lee at fiona.lee@gmail.com

The CUNY Graduate Center

Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2010-2011

The Postcolonial Studies Group presents:

Una Chung

Sarah Lawrence College

Subsumption of Violence or

Grounds for a New Ethics of Digital Culture?
Remembering Frantz Fanon in

an Era of Capture and Governmentality

Feb 25^th at 1:30 p.m.

CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5414

All are welcome.

Today the increasingly common description of our contemporary world depicts a global situation dominated by information systems, the demands and strains of “cognitive capitalism,” and strategies of governance centered on risk, security, and preemptive global conflicts. It seems that apparatuses of capture have taken prominence in the very definition of affect itself, such that affect is increasingly perceived to be just that—an object of capture—by institutions of mental health, police, security, and communications technology from infrastructure to mobile devices. Given the emergence of such a politics of affect, how are we theoretically to reconsider the relationship of affect to ethics and politics? In Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Baruch Spinoza, the concept of affect provides new ground for an ethics beyond morality; however, contemporary studies of affect veer between the amoral objectivity of cognitive science on the one hand and the arbitrary imposition of diverse moral codes deriving from other traditions (criminal justice, human rights, Western psychology, etc.) on the other. I would like to suggest a different possible course, in this paper, by specifically turning to Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial politics in hopes of discovering the necessary relation of contemporary politics to studies of affect. Fanon described the colonial situation as an intense site of affective malpractice, requiring an appeal to the founding limit of politics—absolute violence. The appearance of the absolute counters the trend of much of contemporary cultural studies of affect, which have tended to domesticate affect into a liberal individual context. Between domestication and capture, the line of absolute violence cuts deeply through the heart of the modern subject. Working through Deleuze and Fanon, I propose a reworking of aesthetics, ethics, and politics for digital culture today.

Una Chung (Ph.D, CUNY Graduate Center) is Assistant Professor in Global Studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She writes on contemporary film, new media art and design, and literary culture, within a theoretical framework emphasizing critical theory, postcolonial studies, globalization, materialist philosophies, and aesthetics. She is currently working on a book project investigating critical approaches to the analysis of affect, and specifically how such discourses shape our thinking about ethics today.

The CUNY Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

The Postcolonial Studies Group is a chartered organization of the Doctoral Students’ Council. Please visit our website at www.opencuny.org/psg

Questions? Email Fiona Lee at fiona.lee@gmail.com.

The CUNY Graduate Center
Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2010-2011

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

New York University

Reclaiming Secularism?

Reading Women and Religion in Contemporary Hindu India

Postcolonial feminist thinking on the subject of women and religion has until recently tended solely to draw attention to and deplore the ways in which traditional religious doctrines and patriarchal religious communities have regulated or oppressed women. This has especially been the case in India where the dominant feminist position has been characterized as broadly left-liberal, and where religion is concerned secular-reformist in orientation. A more radical emphasis has however begun to emerge in the thinking on this issue especially in feminist scholarship in the disciplinary fields of religion and anthropology, with a pronounced emphasis on women’s agency as religious subjects. This agency, although never denied, has now begun to demand new explanatory frames. My paper will examine the implications of Hindu (specifically, Brahmin) women’s subjectivity within the problematic of caste. I shall address the representation of the Brahmin widow in two modern Indian literary texts, and highlight the questions they raise for the politics of caste as well as female agency.

September 24th at 2 p.m.
CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5409

All are welcome.

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is Global Distinguished Professor at New York University, in the Department of English. She has taught at the University of Oxford and in Delhi. Her publications include Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (Routledge, 1993) and Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India (Duke University Press, 2003). Her co-authored essay, ‘Shahbano’, which first appeared in Signs (1989), has been widely anthologized. Her most recent work is The Crisis of Secularism in India, jointly edited with Anuradha Needham (Duke University Press, 2006). She is currently completing a book on the Indian novel in English after Midnight’s Children.

The CUNY Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

The Postcolonial Studies Group is a chartered organization of the Doctoral Students’ Council.

Questions? Email Fiona Lee at fiona.lee [at] gmail.com