High Theory – Page 4

Theory from the South with Borderlines

by webwitchAugust 7, 2021June 15, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Olga Verlato and Antara Chakrabarti, contributing editors at Borderlines, talk about the concept of theory from the south, which critiques the notion that theory originating from the global north exhausts the possibilities of critical theoretical understanding.

Olga Verlato is a PhD candidate at New York University in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, and a Contributing Editor for the Middle East at Borderlines. She works on the modern history of Egypt and the Mediterranean, focusing on the impact of multilingual practices and language ideologies on politics, society, and culture.

Antara Chakrabarti is a Doctoral Student in the Sociocultural track of the Dept. of Anthropology in Columbia University. Her research strives to ethnographically and historically understand the intersections of environment, mobilities, and infrastructures in contemporary South Asia. She is a Contributing Editor for South Asia at Borderlines.

Borderlines is a student-run, open-access site mentored by the editors of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME). It seeks to rethink ideas of region and area studies by exploring different categories and histories within and across borderlines that have constructed areas of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Antara and Olga also interview Saronik about High Theory in this episode, about its origins and the work that it does. Find the full transcript of the episode at Borderlines.

Music used in promotional material: ‘Early Rising’ by Dlay

Ghazal

by webwitchJuly 31, 2021June 14, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Manan Kapoor talks about the Ghazal, the medieval Arabic poetic form which travelled to the Indian subcontinent in the 12th century and flourished there ever since. He focuses on the work of Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri-American poet who perfected the art of the ghazal in the English language. Kapoor’s biography of Shahid, A Map of Longings, was published earlier this year. Particular references are made to the poem “In Arabic” from Shahid’s collection Call me Ishmael Tonight, the ghazals sung by Begum Akhtar which greatly influenced Shahid’s work, and English ghazals written by poets like Adrienne Rich which he critiqued.

Manan Kapoor is an Indian writer and translator. A Map of Longings: The Life and Works of Agha Shahid Ali (Vintage, Penguin Random House India) is his latest work. His debut novel The Lamentations of a Sombre Sky was shortlisted for Sahitya Akademi’s Yuva Puruskar 2017. In 2019, he was a writer-in-residence at Sangam House Writers’ Residency. His writings have appeared in The Caravan Magazine, Boston Review, The Hindu, Stockholm Review of Literature, Scroll, The Wire, and Firstpost among others. He lives in Chandigarh.

Music used for promotional material: “Raga Kirwani” on the Sarod by Ustad Ali Akbar Khan

High Theory is one-year old today! This is our 56th episode. We are deeply grateful to our guests, our audience all over the world, and our loyal supporters who spread the word everyday on social media. Thank you!

Tagged : Agha Shahid Ali / arabic poetry / Indian English poetry / Indian music / persian poetry / poetics / poetry

Deindustrialization

by webwitchJuly 26, 2021June 13, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Gabriel Winant talks with Kim about the decline of the industrial working class and the rise of the health care industry.

Gabriel is an assistant professor of History at the University of Chicago. His book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, is recently out from Harvard University Press. You can read his recent article on the subject in The New York Times.

The Next Shift focuses on the working class in the American context and Pittsburgh in particular. In the full version of our conversation, Gabriel recommended Aaron Benanav’s book Automation and the Future of Work (Verso 2020), for an argument about the larger global economic structures of deindustrialization. He also talks a bit about James Boggs, as someone who was well positioned to notice the effects of deindustrialization. We found this article about Boggs worth reading.

The image for this episode is a photograph of the abandoned Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, taken by Thomas Hawk on 13 June 2010. The image is posted of Flickr under a creative commons attribution non-commercial license. Lauren Berlant describes gives this photograph as a bad image of neoliberalism, which allows our social theory to derive “its urgency and its reparative imaginary from spaces of catastrophe and risk where the exemplum represents structural failure” (“The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times” Society and Space 34 no. 3 (2016) p.395). But I like it. Saronik modified the original image.

Music used in promotional material: ‘Shadow of a Coal Mine’ by Linda Draper

Tagged : capitalism / deindustrialization / economics / history of capitalism / history of labor / labor studies / medical humanities

Decolonial Queerness

by webwitchJuly 19, 2021June 11, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Sandeep Bakshi (@sandeepbak on Twitter) talks to Saronik about understanding queerness and its emancipatory politics through transnational solidarity building, the persistent inclusion of trans and queer epistemological frames in social justice movements, especially in the work done by the Decolonizing Sexualities Network. Sandeep explains this concept and the DSN’s objective by referring to the works of Maria Lugones, Sylvia Tamale and the Fallist movement, and Karma Chávez and Against Equality.

Sandeep Bakshi researches on transnational queer and decolonial enunciation of knowledges. He received his PhD from the School of English, University of Leicester, UK, and is currently employed as an Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Queer Literatures at the University of Paris. He heads the “Gender and Sexuality Studies” research group and coordinates two research seminars, “Peripheral Knowledges” and “Empires, Souths, Sexualities,”. Co-editor of Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (Oxford: Counterpress, 2016) and Decolonial Trajectories, special issue of Interventions (2020), he has published on queer and race problematics in postcolonial literatures and cultures. He is the founder and serves on the board of the Decolonizing Sexualities Network.

Image: Cover of the book Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions

Music used in promotional material: “Hear Me Out” by Ketsa

Tagged : Decolonization / gender and sexuality / intersectional feminism / intersectionality / queer politics / queer studies / queer theory / sexuality / trans studies

Racial Affect

by webwitchJuly 11, 2021June 9, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Oishani Sengupta talks about the felt experiences of racism, especially as they are represented in Victorian literature and its contemporary readership, which is the subject of her research. The conversation ranges from the novels of H. Rider Haggard and Charles Dickens to the felt experience of caste, as analyzed in the work of scholars like Junaid Shaikh.

Oishani Sengupta (@oishani on Twitter) is a PhD candidate at the University of Rochester exploring histories of racial affect and visual print culture in the nineteenth century British empire. Also the project coordinator of the William Blake Archive, she looks closely at racist illustration practices and their central role in colonial politics.

Image: Cover of the first French edition of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines

Music used in promotional material: ‘Last Sigh’ by Holy Pain

Tagged : caste / postcolonial studies / postcolonial theory / race / undisciplining / victorian literature / Victorian Studies

Modernization

by webwitchJuly 4, 2021June 9, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Varsha Venkatasubramanian discusses the many trajectories of modernization as a theoretical concept. She focuses mainly on the history of development in the US and in India, through the cold war years and continuing to the present day.

Varsha (@varsha_venkat_ on Twitter) is a graduate student focusing on the history of dams in the US and the World as it relates to foreign policy, policy history, environmental movements, and legal history. She is particularly interested in US-India relations and infrastrcuture projects during the 1950s to the 1980s.

Image: Sardar Sarovar Dam, Gujarat, India.

Music used in promotional material: ‘Warm is Near’ by Post Human Era

Tagged : dams / development / hydropolitcs / hydropower / politcal economy / political history / uneven development / US-India relations

Sexual Difference

by webwitchJune 27, 2021June 9, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Emma Heaney talks about the social organization of the supposedly biologically derived terms of the sex binary into a hierarchy of persons and qualities. She speaks widely about the work that she and her colleagues are doing, drawing on a tradition of scholarship that includes the work of Luce Irigaray, Hortense Spillers, Cathy J. Cohen and others.

Emma Heaney is a teacher, researcher, and writer living in Queens. Her first book, a study of the
medicalization of trans femininity and the uptake of the diagnostic figure in works of twentieth-
century literature and philosophy, is The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and
the Trans Feminine Allegory (Northwestern, 2017). Her forthcoming second book, Feminism
Against Cisness, is an edited collection of essays by Trans Studies scholars who use anti-colonial,
Black, and Marxist feminist methods to address the many legacies of the historical emergence of
the idea that assigned sex determines sexed experience. Her introduction for that collection,
entitled “Sexual Difference Without Cisness” provides the basis for this interview.

Music used in promotional material: “Flow” by dustmotes

Tagged : feminism / feminist theory / queer studies / queer theory / trans studies

Resonance

by webwitchJune 21, 2021June 6, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Kim speaks with Julie Beth Napolin about Resonance.

Julie Beth’s book The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (Fordham UP, 2020) explores resonance and sound in modern literature. In the episode she references Jean-Luc Nancy’s book Listening (Fordham UP, 2007), Inayat Khan’s The Mysticism of Sound and Music (Shambala Publications, 1996), the music of Toru Takemitsu, and Damo Suzuki´s “sound carriers.” In our longer conversation she talked about Naomi Waltham-Smith’s new book, Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham UP, 2021)

Julie Beth is an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at The New School. She also makes music under the name Meridians. You can listen on Sound Cloud!

This week’s image is a simulation of interference between two sound waves in two-dimensions made by Ibrahim S. Souki, used under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License, from Wikimedia Commons.

Tagged : colonial discourse / modernism / narrative theory / postcolonial literature / sound studies

Experimental Life

by webwitchJune 12, 2021June 3, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Travis Chi Wing Lau talks about the notion that one can experiment on the fundamental conditions and nature of life in order to perfect them. He looks at this idea in diverse literary, scientific, and cultural contexts from the vitality debate and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the perils of the CRISPR technology and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and The New Engagement, as well as in two chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020).

Music used in promotional material: “Future Life” by Ketsa

Tagged : bioethics / disability studies / health humanities / medical humanities / science and literature / science studies