Public Talk and discussion:
The Colonial and the National: Critical Questions
Professor Ishita Banerjee-Dube
El Colegio de México
Recent endeavours within history, anthropology, gender and postcolonial studies have pointed to the usefulness of analysing the Empire and the Nation together in order to track the critical ways they shaped each other. In particular, they have underscored the mutual imbrications of gender and sexuality in formations of colony and empire. Drawing upon such impulses, my talk will attempt an experimental juxtaposition of the empire and the colony, across time and continents. It will explore the politics of gender and the dominant cultural discourse of nationalism in the two colonies of Mexico and India and underscore how under different circumstances and through divergent modes, the ‘woman’ provides the key element in imperial strategies of domination and nationalist tactics of containment.
Centre for Cultural Studies and Department of Politics
Goldsmiths College, University of London
26th May 2011 – 5pm-7pm
Ben Pimlott Lecture Theatre
all welcome.
Ishita Banerjee-Dube is a Professor of History at the Centre for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de México. She has been a Visiting Professor at the Department of History and Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, University of Syracuse, and a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, and the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University. She is the author of Religion, Law and Power: Tales of Time in Eastern India (Anthem Press, 2007/2009); Divine Affairs: Religion, Pilgrimage and the State in Colonial and Postcolonial India (IIAS, 2001), and, in Spanish, Fronteras del Hinduismo (El Colegio de México 2007). Among her more than half a dozen edited books are: Ancient to Modern (Oxford University Press, 2009), Caste in History ((Oxford University Press, 2008/2010); and Unbecoming Modern (Social Science Press, 2006).
Her research interests cover questions of gender and cuisine, empire and nation, and popular religion and state practices.
