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Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha

Professor of Literary Studies, Kazi Nazrul University, India, and (currently) Institute of Language Studies and Research (ILSR), Kolkata, India

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

October/November 2022

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»Anarchiving Social Change: Black Reason, Caste Conflicts and the Postcolonial Imperative«

Project outline:

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)

Research partner:

Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha follows the invitation of the Frankfurt research initiative »ConTrust. Trust in Conflict - Political Life under Conditions of Uncertainty«. During his stay he cooperates with Pavan Malreddy, Principal Investigator of the research initiative »ConTrust«.

Scholarly profile of Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha

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).

Website:
Please find more information about Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha here and here.

Main areas of research:

Literature in English, Postcolonial Studies, Critical Theory, Translation Studies, American Literature

Selected publications:

(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.

Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha

Scholarly profile of Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha

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