Lecture-cum-Seminar series of the project “Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship”.
The complete schedule can be viewed at https://www.forum-transregionale-studien.de/fileadmin/pdf/LcS-winter2011-12.pdf
We would like to invite you to the first lecture and seminar in this series:
BODHISATTVA KAR
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta / Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam
“EMPIRE AND ETYMONS: THE PHILOLOGICAL PROBLEMATIC OF NATIONALISMS IN COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA
October 27, 2011
Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at Freie Universitaet Berlin
Habelschwerdter Allee 45, room J 23/16
16:00-17:00 (Lecture only)
You can see the abstract https://www.forum-transregionale-studien.de/bodhisattva-kar.html
This lecture critically explores the philological path of negotiating the riddle of origin in a bourgeois empire. Focusing particularly on the strange attraction to the etymological thought of a wide range of nineteenth and early twentieth‐century nationalists in South Asia, it tries to understand how in the analytical unit of the etymon were condensed various nationalisms’ (mutually conflicting) struggles with the arbitrary, endorsements of the familial and concerns regarding the originary. At one level, this helps us to identify the discursive trade‐offs between the imperial economies of filiation, the changing grammatical cultures and the emergent territorial nationalisms in the colonies. At another, this also allows us to approach the disciplinary history of philology at its popular, and seemingly undisciplinable, frontier. While most of the historical materials used in this particular lecture come from the eastern and north‐ eastern regions of British South Asia, its analytical claim extends across the usual divide between metropolitan Europe and the colonial peripheries. Indeed, it is a central contention of this lecture that in the period under discussion, etymology functioned not simply as an axis of vertical temporality connecting the original and the existent, but also as a critical principle of ordering the spatial extents of such circulatory structures as nations or empires. In the seminar part of the event, an attempt will be made to re‐inspect some of these points through a close reading of William Jones’s canonical 1792 text “ The Ninth Anniversary Discourse, on the Origin and Families of Nations”, while critically responding to a number of conceptual and methodological challenges inaugurated by R. Howard Bloch’s 1983 work Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages.
Bodhisattva Kar is Fellow in History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India. His immediate area of specialization is the north‐eastern frontier of British India, and in his work he tries to bring economic and cultural histories into conversation. A PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University of India, Kar has taught and held fellowships at El Colegio de Mexico (Mexico City), Oxford Brookes University (Oxford), Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin), École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (Amsterdam). He has just finished a book manuscript titled Accumulation of the Primitive: The North‐Eastern Frontier of British India, 1790s ‐1930s, and is now working simultaneously on two book projects provisionally called “Some Histories of the Social: Essays in Spatial Politics” and “Fantastic Histories of the Naga Hills.” He has also recently co‐edited a volume of essays called “New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices” with Partha Chatterjee and Tapat i Guha‐Thakurta which is scheduled to be published in 2012.
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