Questions of the Nonhuman: Rethinking Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia

Rajbir Singh Judge
November 15-15, 2019

This two-day workshop, Questions of the Nonhuman: Rethinking Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia, at Columbia University in the City of New York will explore the various linkages between South Asia and the nonhuman. Papers will explore, through a range of methods, how the non-human helps us to grasp the coordinates that structure(d) empire and its afterlives through, what Etienne Balibar (1991) calls, “the systematic ‘bestialization’ of individuals and racialized human groups” (53). Yet, such a reading, as Naisargi Dave (2014) reminds us, could itself be “a sign of humanism’s triumph,” requiring we ask, Dave continues, “is seeing humanism everywhere only a capitulation to its colonization of imagination and thought?” The nonhuman, in other words, is not an invariable proxy for the human nor is the management of men, for example, the sole objective of empire or the postcolonial state. Therefore, papers also consider how centering the non-human undoes the partitions of the “anthropological machine,” centered on divisions between subject/object, sameness/difference, spectator/participant, inclusion/exclusion, by attending to how the nonhuman troubles and, perhaps, even surpasses given forms including our desire for autochthonous ones (Agamben 2002).

Download the workshop booklet.