Professor J. Daniel Elam is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham University Press, 2020), and Impossible and Necessary (Orient BlackSwan, 2021), and two co-edited volumes on revolutionary anticolonial writing, Reading Revolutionaries (with Kama Maclean, 2014) and Writing Revolution (with Kama Maclean and Chris Moffat, 2017).

This talk is based on my current book project that contemplates the postcolonial trajectories of development and democracy. My focus is a river bridge in Bangladesh which is one of the largest and priciest infrastructural projects so far. In 2011, the World Bank suspected possible corruption and decided to withdraw crucial funding. A Canadian court later dismissed the case in absence of acceptable evidence, labeling it as hearsay and rumor.

Dr. Nazmul S. Sultan is George Kingsley Roth Research Fellow in Politics and International Studies at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. Dr. Sultan is a political theorist with particular interests in the history of political thought, empire and anticolonial thought, popular sovereignty, and modern conceptions of the global. His current book project explores the question of popular sovereignty in modern Indian political thought and offers a new interpretation of the anticolonial democratic project.

Dr Mishka Sinha is a Research Associate at St. John’s College, Oxford, and co-director of the project on St. John’s and the Colonial Past with Professor William Whyte. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of the modern period. Her research interests focus on the history of orientalism and the transcultural history of knowledge in the context of colonialism and empire, in particular, the transfer of knowledge from Asia to Europe.

Manu Samnotra is an Associate Professor in political theory at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Worldly Shame: Ethos in Action. Worldly Shame examines shame’s worldly possibilities through the lens of Hannah Arendt’s political writings. Samnotra makes a case both for shame’s capacity to orient us towards a shared political world, and for reading Arendt as an anti-colonial thinker. Operating broadly within the frame of Comparative Political Theory, his next project brings Gandhian thought into conversation with liberal and republican conceptions of political dignity.

The modern concept of ‘dynasty’ is a politically-motivated modern intellectual invention. For many advocates of a strong sovereign nation-state across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in France, Germany, and Japan, the concept helped in visualizing the nation-state as a primordial entity sealed by the continuity of birth and blood, indeed by the perpetuity of sovereignty.

This talk will discuss salient features of authoritarian rule in Pakistan. First, the permanent state of emergency that shapes political life in the country fuels arbitrary and whimsical forms of governance. The perpetual violation of the constitution by the ruling classes tells us that rather than viewing the Pakistani state as theocratic, it might be better to suggest that the country's crisis results from the fact that it lacks any political theology or sacred document.

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Within British imperial thought, the transfer of sovereign power to India and subsequently other former colonies was not perceived as the final end of British imperialism, but simply its latest, evolved iteration in the form of the Commonwealth of Nations, which absorbed the sources of and arguments for British imperial power, both real and imagined, in the postwar decades. This talk explores the relationships between British imperial thought and British nationality after 1947.

‘I have some Garos as my tenants. Though otherwise very obedient and docile, they refused to tell me their dreams.’ Tarun Chandra Sinha, ‘Dreams of the Garos’

‘When you have cut down all the trees and mined all the mountains, when you have analysed all your dreams, there will be nothing left for you to break. The Earth then will be a rubbish dump, a vast trans body dismembered and devoured. The bodies of the colonists and your bodies, esteemed psychoanalysts, will be buried with the trans organs you have taken from us.’ Paul Preciado, ‘Can the Monster Speak’