hss-seminar-64
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Ropar
HSS Seminar
‘Modernity and the (in)conclusive: Some questions on self-fashioning’
by
Prof. Sumit Chakrabarti
April 23, 2019, Tuesday, at 10:00 AM
Venue: Conference Room 2.
Abstract
The talk will focus on modernity both as a condition of and an apparatus for fashioning the self as a product of culture. It will try to read modernity against the grain, with references to Tagore’s essays on literature and Bruno Latour’s reading of the condition of modernity as a rift between nature and culture. The talk will explore the possibility of reading the condition of modernity from the perspectives of the uncertain and the inconclusive.
About the speaker:
Sumit Chakrabarti is a Professor of English at the Department of English, Presidency University, Kolkata. He received his PhD in 2008 from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Department of British and Commonwealth Studies, University of Lodz, Poland, from February 2009 to February 2011. In 2011, he published The Impact of the Postcolonial Theories of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha on Western Thought: The Third-world Intellectual in the First-world Academy (New York: Edwin Mellen). His second book Imperial Clerks in India and Britain: Life, Labour, Latitude (Routledge) is awaited for 2020. At present he is working on three volumes, one each on Postcolonialism, Masculinity and Postsecularism as Series Editor for Orient Blackswan.