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Centre for Imperial and Post Colonial Studies News and events

Scandal and Scholarship: The Politics of Post-colonialism and Caste Seminar

De Deborah Sutton
Time:
13:00 - 14:00
Date:
16 May 2018
Venue:
65/1095, Avenue Campus, SO17 1BF

For more information regarding this seminar, please email Mary Andrew at m.j.andrew@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

Part of the CIPCS Seminar Series Spring 2018. Download the full programme below.

This seminar is concerned with the relationship between Historical scholarship and the historicist claims made on behalf of essentialist, exclusive and violent nationalisms. This paper focusses on a few, increasingly cohered, scholars whose ideas affirm the politics of Hindu nationalism, and the academic and popular spaces in which their work has appeared. I am interested in scholarly resonance of this work, as a scholarship of opposition and as a scholarship that situates itself in the post-colonial.  In particular, it examines the work of S. N. Balagangadhara of Ghent University in Belgium and his influence. Work associated with him, the ‘Ghent School’, have followed the grain of postcolonial though but extend their ideas to generate a generalised, meta-critique based on the concept: ‘colonial consciousness’. ‘Colonial consciousness’ exceeds Saidian Orientalism to propose that certain current descriptive and analytical terms – Hinduism, secularism and caste, in particular – represent an endurance and propagation of anti-Indian colonial distortions. This concept deliberately cultivates a space outside of the field of mainstream scholarly debate and aligns closely with the politics of Hindutva.

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Speaker information

Dr Deborah Sutton , University of Lancaster. Senior Lecturer in Modern South Asian History

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