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Ulka Anjaria
Brandeis University
Ulka Anjaria is professor of English and director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University, USA. She is the author of Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (2012), Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture (2019), and Understanding Bollywood: The Grammar of Hindi Cinema (2021), editor of A History of the Indian Novel in English (2015) and co-editor (with Anjali Nerlekar) of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures.
Talk Information:
Reading With a Loving Eye: New Critical Practice for New Times
April 21, 2023 | 9:00 AM
This paper argues that in order to understand the proliferation of literary and cultural forms that characterize the new India, we need to envision a new role for the critic, one that is shaped by the texts she seeks to engage. Drawing on the multi-media works of documentary filmmaker Paromita Vohra, including her newest web-based project Agents of Ishq, which probes the diverse worlds of love and sexuality in the new India, I ask: What would it look like to read the contemporary landscape not from a skeptical distance but, in Vohra’s words, “with a loving eye”? How would this further the project of decolonial epistemologies?