Seminar 6

Beckett with Sade: The Longest Conversation

Prof. Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania)

Moderator: Dr. Arka Chattopadhyay (IIT Gandhinagar)

Event Link: Click here

Date and Time: December 11, 8PM (IST)/9:30 AM (EST)

Beckett’s confrontation with the work of Sade went on for several decades. My Beckett & Sade follows a chronological order, moving from second-hand references scattered in the first texts to a rethinking of Sade via later novels and plays. Beckett did not translate Sade’s notorious 120 Days of Sodom as planned, but knew that he was participating in a “Sade boom” that dominated the French intellectual scene in the Thirties and Forties. Beckett found inspiration in books and essays by Guillaume Apollinaire, Mario Praz, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Simone de Beauvoir, Geoffrey Gorer, and Pierre Klossowski. It was Sade who allowed Beckett to make sense of pain and torture in Dante, Schopenhauer and Proust. Sade links Beckett with a subversive version of the “dark enlightenment.”

 

Speaker Bio: Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, co-founder and senior curator of the Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the author or editor of more than forty books and collections of essays, including Beckett & Sade (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Rires prodigues (Éditions Stilus, Paris, January 2021).

 

Seminar 5

Nabarun and Literary Dissent: A Book Panel

Panelists:

Suman Mukhopadhyay (Film and Theatre Director)

Dr Anustup Basu (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign)

Dr Priyanka Basu (SOAS, British Library)

Moderators:

Dr Samrat Sengupta, Dr Arka Chattopadhyay, and Dr Sourit Bhattacharya (co-editors of the Nabarun volume)

Event Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBd2_T9P1dk

Date and Time: November 7, 2020, 6-30 PM (IST)

This book panel will engage with our recently published edited volume, Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2020). Panelists who have either contributed to the collection or drawn upon Nabarun's work in theatre and film will share their experiences of working with/on Nabarun. 

To say a few words about the volume, it aims to introduce the Bengali writer (1948-2014) to a global audience through some of his short stories and poems in English translation and a series of critical essays on his works. A political commitment to literature frames Nabarun Bhattacharya's aesthetic project and the volume wishes to tease out the various perspectives on this complex meeting of politics and aesthetics. Be it the novel on dogs or those on petro-pollution and the machine, the political question in Nabarun echoes significant contemporary issues, such as animal rights, global warming and techno-capitalism. This opens up the possibility of questioning the traditional paradigm of humanist values in a world of catastrophic and violent encounters such as nuclear war or holocaust, which keeps returning in Nabarun's works.

For more information on the volume, visit https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/nabarun-bhattacharya-9789388630511/

 

 

 

Seminar 4

Sanglap Book Conversation with Dr James Martell and Dr Fernanda Negrete: "Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal"

Speakers: Dr James Martell & Dr Fernanda Negrete

Moderator: Dr Arka Chattopadhyay

In his book, "Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal: The Mother’s Son", James Martell asks the question “On whom do we write on when we do it as modernists?” In this way, by turning the question of modernism from “against whom” or “from whom”—where the answer invokes a mostly masculine tradition of forefathers—the question of “on whom” modernism is written focuses on the forgotten element of the female and/or maternal body as a place of inscription and violence.

Focusing on their conception and use of the notion of the mother, Martell’s book proposes a new interpretation of literature by modernist authors like Rousseau, Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke, Joyce, and Beckett. Seen through this maternal relation, their writing appears as the product of an "anxiety" rising not from paternal influence, but from the violence done to their mother in their attempts at self-creation through writing. In order to bring to light this modernist violence, this study analyzes these authors in tandem with Derrida’s work on the gender-specific violence of the Western philosophical and literary tradition. The book demonstrates how these writer-sons wrote their works in a constant crisis vis-à-vis the mother’s body as site of both origin and dissolution. It proves how, if modernism was first established as a patrilineal heritage, it was ultimately written on the bodies of women and mothers, confusing them in order to appropriate their generative traits.

At a time where we see both rising movements foregrounding not only gender but also motherhood as a question and force (#metoo and women’s march, momtifas, moms demand action, etc.) as well as questioning of male authority and the links between masculinity and historic-foundational violence (tumbling down of slave owners guilty also of innumerable acts of rape), this presentation and panel will discuss the relation between this violence and repression and the writing, thematic, and style, of certain modernism in tandem with deconstruction.

If as Bruno Clément says, Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal’s invitation is to shake up limits (between literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis and poetics, rhetoric and gender studies), it is also an invitation to think the limit of the page or screen on which modernism and, ultimately, all writing is inscribed, and to see what happens when we let these repressed surfaces of inscription rise.

Speaker Bio:

James Martell is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at Lyon College. He is the co-editor— together with Arka Chattopadhyay—of Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature (Roman Books, 2013). He has published articles on Derrida, Deleuze, Beckett, and the cinema of Béla Tarr in journals like Mosaic, the Oxford Literary Review, Oxímora, and Sanglap. He co-edited together with Fernanda Negrete a special volume of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, titled ‘Beckett Beyond Words.’ His book, Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal: The Mother's Son (Routledge) was published in July 2019. His upcoming articles are on Malabou and plasticity, Deleuze and Beckett, and doubles in Poe, Lars von Trier, and Defoe in a time of pandemics.

Fernanda Negrete is Assistant Professor of French and Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis & Culture at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her first book, The Aesthetic Clinic: Feminine Sublimation in Contemporary Writing, Psychoanalysis, and Art is forthcoming in October 2020 with SUNY Press. It examines works by women novelists (Marguerite Duras and Clarice Lispector) and artists (Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Lygia Clark, and Roni Horn), in connection with psychoanalytic concepts and French theories to discern aesthetic experience as a clinical function of reading beyond interpretation. Her essays on psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and modern and contemporary literature and art have appeared in S: Journal for the Circle of Lacanian Ideology Critique, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Humanities, CR: The New Centennial Review, Mosaic, and ARTMargins. She is co-editor of the special issue Beckett Beyond Words with James Martell. She organized and participated in a conversation with Tracy McNulty, Shanna de la Torre, Heidi Arsenault, and Kristine Klement about sexual violence that will appear in Penumbr(a)’s forthcoming first issue. Her works in progress are on music in Marguerite Duras, imagination in Deleuze, and the taboo of virginity in the present day through recent cinema.

Arka Chattopadhyay is Assistant Professor of Literary Studies in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar and founding co-editor of Sanglap.

 

Date: September 12, 2020

Time: 8.30 pm IST / 4pm BST

Event Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ZfQuPvpOs

 

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Seminar 3

Digital Pedagogy and the Classroom in Higher Education

Gorgio Agamben’s scepticism about Covid-19 being a “pretext for the increasingly pervasive diffusion of digital technologies” particularly invoked online education as “part of the technological barbarism” that cancels “from life of any experience of the senses as well as the loss of the gaze, permanently imprisoned in a spectral screen” (translation by D. Alan Dean). His invectives brought forth criticism from both sides. But, what is equally interesting is that his intervention comes through a blogpost on 23 May 2020, perhaps attesting to the ubiquity of digital and information technology that he censures as the “new dictatorship of telematics”. Since the wake of the global pandemic, the debates around digital education have only escalated along with the growing concerns about the digital chasm, flaring social inequalities through disproportionate “accessibility”. This panel brings together academics from various institutes of higher education in India to reflect on the dissemination of classroom pedagogy through virtual platforms in a deeply striated social ethos.

The panellists will deliberate on a spectrum of issues from their personal experiences of using digital tools and software for teaching and assignments to larger questions imbricated in the debate about engaging the students or effecting social changes in the classroom. The sudden shock that has sent us decisively - for the moment - to “online” spaces has exacerbated these challenges considerably. The inequalities of cultural capital are repeatedly revealed to be inequalities of bare capital. The hierarchical structures that have always made classroom learning difficult for a large proportion of students have now congealed into the unidirectional top-down model that video-based teaching seems to necessitate and thus unveil. The contours of our space are unfortunately circumscribed - our space is online, whichever way we manage to access it, and our privileges delineate our windows of access. Given such constraints, could we hope to find a participatory space, one in which those engaged “come to feel like masters of their thinking”, as Paolo Freire would have it?

This discussion, drawing on experiences of the past and encompassing policies, techniques and digital infrastructures whose significance extends to a future beyond the Coronatimes, will braid together questions such as “to whom does online teaching cater, and how can we democratise it?” “How do we negotiate privilege while striving towards equal access to technological platforms in a vast and uneven demography, riven by location, class, caste and economic power? Finally, responding to these challenges the panel will think through specific circumstance to address how Digital Humanities could be taught in India as an emerging field, specifically in the higher education sector by institutions to bolster the production of knowledge through a creative pedagogy.

Moderator:

Dr. Anuparna Mukherjee (Assistant Professor IISER Bhopal)

Panellists:

Dr. Adity Singh (Assistant Professor, IISER Bhopal)

Dr. Dibyadyuti Roy (Assistant Professor, IIM, Indore)

Dr. Maya Dodd (Assistant Professor, FLAME University, Pune)

Dr. Prayag Ray (Assistant Professor, St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata)

 

Date: 9 August 2020

Time: 4pm IST

 

 

Event link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=007BZauWv8A

 

 

 

Seminar 2:

Forging Solidarities: Community and the COVID-19 Pandemic

18^th July

11:30-13:30 (UK time) / 4-6pm IST

Panel organisers: Sreya Mallika Datta (3yrd Year PGR, School of English, University of Leeds) and Dr. Arunima Bhattacharya (Postdoctoral Research Assistant, School of History, University of Leeds)

Webinar Abstract

The idea and practice of community in a COVID-19 world is both fractious and immanent: the pandemic has fostered a tremendous urgency in identifying the deep lines of racial, environmental, and class injustices that characterise the structures within which we articulate our subject-positions and locatedness in the world. This has led to a reworking of how we understand ourselves as individual subjects vulnerable to, and with, others. These divisive fault-lines have also been the catalyst for mobilising a sense of community, as is evident in the momentum the Black Lives Matter and decolonisation movements have gained in the COVID-19 moment.

Different individuals have conceptualised means of understanding this ‘viral moment’ in our collective lives, whether it is Achille Mbembe who speaks of the pandemic not only as that which contaminates the embodied practices of community but also as a moment where we begin to imagine a world in-common to all—human, non-human, and viruses alike—or Arundhati Roy who calls for radical self- reflection and a re-cognising of our collective potential to make a positive transition through the  “portal” the pandemic creates between our past and future.

The space and format of this webinar is envisioned as a pause, that is, not as a further intellectualisation, with the theoretical tools we already possess, to ‘explain’ the duality of helplessness and hope that characterises this moment, but as our collective unworking as subjects. The central question of our time is the question of community: how do we relate to one another when the loss of existing modes of collective belonging are being mourned or when the concept of community itself has been weaponised by an exclusionary rhetoric? How do we mediate the loss of communitarian structures (e.g. festivals, prayers, etc.), contingent communities of strangers (e.g. everyday interactions on the ‘road’), or communities of affiliation and kin (e.g. friends and family)? At the same time, how do we challenge the political rhetoric of exclusionary community—built around medicalised arguments such as “herd immunity”, for instance, or its xenophobic inscription on racialised and migrant bodies—with new political/communitarian imaginations and convivial frameworks of mobilisation? What might it mean to think of what Giorgio Agamben calls the “coming community”, that is, community not as enclosed form or essence but as an active and adaptive practice of being-in-common whose horizons are always shifting and fashioning open signifiers of relating with others?  How do we recalibrate community to grapple with that whose full effects and range are yet to be determined?

Speakers and Bio

1. Dima Chami is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds where she researches the intersections between migration, biopolitics and Nigerian literature. Alongside her academic work, Dima has been involved in various community-based initiatives through which she seeks to merge her academic responsibilities with her personal ones. Organising for migrant rights in UKHE and beyond, Dima has both mobilised within the UCU to advance migrant rights in the sector, as well as run a Bibliotherapy reading group based in Leeds, a project with and for asylum seekers and refugees in the U.K
2. Laura Loyola-Hernández is a scholar-activist at the University of Leeds. Her focus is on anti racist, decolonial and feminist research in politics, social media and Higher Education. She is a member of the Racial Justice Network and Yorkshire Resist.
3. Thando Njovane is a teacher and researcher in the Department of Literary Studies at Rhodes University. Her research interests include childhood, psychoanalysis, memory, contested pasts, (auto)biography, & higher education.
4. Souradeep Sengupta is a graduate in physics from Presidency University, Kolkata and the University of Delhi. He has a keen interest in literature (especially speculative fiction), football, socialist politics and organizing, and the history and philosophy of science and science pedagogy. He hopes to start a PhD in theoretical physics soon.

 

Event Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsP56VyuY98

 

 

Seminar 1: Digital Higher Education and Humanities 

Youtube link: Click here

Seminar Series:

With the global Coronavirus outbreak, the higher education sector has undergone rapid changes. Teaching and learning have mostly transitioned online, creating challenges for students, staff and administration. This transition has opened up debates on workload, physical and mental stress, and of access and affordability (as to how to teach online when many students in lesser developed countries do not have adequate technological equipment). People have asked if learning should at all be carried out in separation, or how to combine physical (in-person) and online (distant) forms of learning. Further questions have arisen as to how "global" universities, in the wake of financial crises, plan to deal with the scenario of graduate students/fixed term/precarious staff, who take up huge amounts of teaching and grading loads and depend, both financially and career-wise, on teaching/grading contracts from their universities/institutions. What happens to recruitment of international students as well as the "field work" question? How do issues of student loan and debt measure out here? In this inaugural virtual seminar from Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, humanities scholars from India, Bangladesh, the UK and the USA will respond to some of these and other questions.