Prathama Banerjee is one of the preeminent scholars in India to think of theory and history from the Global South. Her current work focuses on histories of the ‘political’ in colonial and post-colonial India. Sohini Chattopadhyay interviews her on what it means, both intellectually and in terms of academic labor, to conceive of theories from the South. The ideas discussed range from the use of the archaic, to universal history and theories of capital.
Read MoreOmar Abdel-Ghaffar read’s Al-Suyuti’s Fariq complicating our understanding of three aspects of intellectual labor and property: the concept of tasnif as it relates to creativity and trustworthiness, the concept of ‘amal as an undifferentiated description of labor that transcends the dualism between the manual and the intellectual, and the relationship between author and work as a relationship of access rather than one of production.
Read MoreScott’s most recent work, Sex and Secularism, argues that there is a close relation between the formations of the secular and the confinement of women’s bodies. The book follows the journey of several questions raised by Scott in her earlier book, The Politics of the Veil, to contend how secularism is formulated as a discourse of sex and power.
Read MoreA decade is a good time to think about where we are headed in the future. Perhaps we need to take certain seminal ideas and explore them, hone in on certain crucial elements in contemporary prose and poetry, go further into the impact of the “global” on not so “global” literature.
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