The workshop will engage with comparative methodology by examining the intersections of gender, caste and race in South Asia and the world. We will read two articles by Ania Loomba. The first “Race and the Possibilities of Comparative Critique’ (New Literary History 2009) explores the interconnection of Indian and Early Modern historiography and suggests a cautious comparativism that can make visible global histories of race. The second article “Intercaste Marriage and the Liberal Imagination: Vijay Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan” (Economic and Political Weekly 2013) reads the depiction of inter-caste marriage in the context of Tendulkar’s particular engagement with Dalit Panthers literature. This workshop will interest graduate scholars specializing in the history and theory of race, gender and sexuality, caste, postcolonial studies, Early Modern Studies, South Asia and comparative studies.
This workshop+ lunch is open only for graduate students at Ohio State University. Prior registration is required. For a copy of the readings, write to singh.996@osu.edu.
Students outside the Department of English may register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-possibilities-of-comparative-critique-graduate-workshop-with-ania-loomba-tickets-73703562339
This event is sponsored by the Department of English, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, South Asian Initiative and the Humanities Institute at Ohio State.
Ania Loomba is the Catherine Bryson Professor of English at University of Pennsylvania, She researches and teaches early modern literature, histories of race and colonialism, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, andcontemporary Indian literature and culture. Her latest monograph Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India which examines the lives and subjectivities of militant-nationalist andcommunist women in India, from the late 1920s, shortly after the communist movement took root, to the 1960s, when it fractured. Her writings include Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester University Press; 1989; Oxford University Press, 1992) Colonialism/ Postcolonialism (Routledge, 1998; second edition, 2005; third edition 2015; Italian, Turkish, Japanese, Swedish and Indonesian editions) and Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism(Oxford University Press, 2002). She has co-edited Post-colonial Shakespeares (Routledge, 1998); Postcolonial Studies andBeyond (Duke University Press, 2005), Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (Palgrave, 2007), South Asian Feminisms (co-edited with Ritty A. Lukose, Duke University Press, 2012) and Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race and Sexuality (co-edited with Melissa Sanchez; Routledge, 2016). Her latest edited collection is A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Renaissance (Bloomsbury, 2018). She is series editor (with David Johnson of the Open University, UK) of Postcolonial Literary Studies (Edinburgh University Press). She has also produced a critical edition of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (Norton, 2011)