An audio recording of this event is available for download (MP3, 45MB)

In the study of European imperial formations and the forms of governance on which those formations relied, questions of epistemology occupy a capacious and curiously confined analytic space. On the one hand is the shared assumption that the mastery of reason,...

An audio recording of this event is available for download (MP3, 110MB)

To understand how to live in a world where the name of democracy has become a means of enslavement is to understand the dynamics of the dialectic of Enlightenment. It is also to confront the ambiguity of a tragic politics of life: of producing (and alas, denying)...

An audio recording of this event is available for download (MP3, 45MB)

We are seeing the formation of new, often highly specialized, assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights that used to be fully encompassed by the nation-state, but today exit the institutional though not necessarily the geographic settings of the...

For this presentation, Arjun Appadurai will serve as discussant.

The emergence and consolidation of democracy in India – with all its imperfections and partialities – is one of the historical surprises of our era. It challenges understandings of India’s own history, as much as it challenges axioms of classical...

In 1973 Roberto Schwarz published an enormously influential essay called ‘Misplaced Ideas’ - or more literally ‘ideas out of place’, so the interesting questions begin even with the phrase itself. No one placed or misplaced these ideas anywhere, and perhaps they don’t have a ‘place’. What we know is that they feel out of place, that is, they feel as if they have a place that is not where they...

The body of the nation (國體)is a scandalous concept in modern Japanese history, for it discloses the formation of the ‘nation’ in the element of liberalism in Japan’s modernization. This talk aims to historicize ‘nationality,’ ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’ in reference to the governmentality of the pastorate. In Japanese history, the pastoral power is best represented by the institution...

Brahmans, the traditional caste elite of Tamilnadu, who make up no more than 2.5 per cent of its population have been unusually successful in the modern world of educated, professional employment from the nineteenth century to the present day, due to a combination of factors, including - Fuller's paper will argue - anti-Brahmanism and the reservations system, the legacy of caste traditions of...