Friday, March 15, 2013
2:30pm – 4:30pm
Pembroke Hall, Room 305172 Meeting Street
Free admission
Discussion and reception to follow
"Modern Prejudice: 'Vernacular' and 'Universal'"
Seminar with Gyanendra Pandey, Emory University
Gyanendra Pandey is the Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Emory University. A founding member and leading theorist of the Subaltern Studies project, he has written extensively on marginality and citizenship, violence and history. He has lectured and held teaching and visiting appointments at universities and research institutions in India, UK, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia and the USA. Before moving to Emory, he taught for many years at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata; the University of Delhi; and the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA.
He has published extensively on questions of violence, nationalism, marginality and citizenship, as well as on the history of history-writing. Among the best known of his single-authored books are Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (2006); The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (rev. ed. 2006); The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh: Class, Community and Nation in Northern India, 1920-1940 (rev. ed. 2002); and Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2001). He has recently completed an ambitious history of the African American and Dalit struggles, now in production with Cambridge University Press under the title, A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste and Difference in India and the USA; and is currently working on a study of the autobiographical writings of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and Viola Andrews. Three of his books have been brought together in The Gyanendra Pandey Omnibus, published in 2008; and one of them, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India is being reissued as an ‘Oxford India Perennial’ to mark the centenary of Oxford University Press in 2012.
Since 2006, Pandey has been engaged in developing a dialogue between historians and social scientists working on the North and the South. Two international, interdisciplinary workshops on the theme of ‘Subaltern Citizens and their Histories: Investigations from India and the USA’, held at Emory in October 2006 and December 2007; four one-day workshops on the theme of ‘Subalternity and Difference’ held in four different cities in India in August 2009; an invited panel on the same theme that met at the American Historical Association meeting in Boston 2010; a two day workshop on the theme of ‘Un-archived Histories’ held at Emory in February, 2011; a specially edited guest issue of the postcolonial studies journal, Interventions, that was published in November 2008; and two major edited anthologies, Subaltern Citizens and their Histories: Investigations from India and the USA, and Subalternity and Difference: Investigations from the North and the South, by Routledge in 2010 and 2011. A third volume, on the theme of ‘Un-archived Histories’ is under preparation.