Background


Articulation of grievances and subjective discontent is the birth right of the postcolonial citizenship and that has inspired various ideological debates but of late the regimented control of global capital over all forms of individual counter-views has generated a climate of new bio-political control and disciplining. What does Humanities and communicational strategies do to challenge these forces of disarticulation and compulsive desiring of consumerism and populist nationalist desires? One can argue that this is the right time to encourage a culture of un-desiring that can consolidate the postcolonial agency in the age of global capital. All around the world new forms of conservatisms are gaining ground and this rise of ultra nationalist hagiographies, global terror, and xenophobia are perhaps the outcome of the absence of a progressive and critical mode of un-desiring. In other words, in this age of “post-truth” critique has retreated to the point of erasure and this course would attempt to see how a new communicational critical language can be relaunched to provide a counter-hegemony to the forces of global capital which has caused a total annihilation of the public sphere. Popular opinion formation and articulation of desires of subjectivity today is predetermined by forces of the market and economic-political factors. Media and cultures of over-desiring have hijacked the space left to the individual to think and to introspect. Today truth is manufactured and hence we are living in the age of post-truth in the post-Brexit and Post-Trump win phase. The Middle East is burning with the Syrian refugee crisis and civil war, Europe is facing the worst crisis ever due to terror related incidents and to top it all we have the economic crisis triggered by market vagaries and terror. This moment of crisis has been used by conservative forces across the world to foment the language of ultra-nationalism and anti-terror. Perhaps since the Second World War for the first time we are living in a climate of greater paranoia of the other and the mutual hatred among communities are growing high. What does postcolonial articulation and communication do in such a situation? Can it reconstitute ideology critique by fostering an ambience of a culture of reversals or un-desiring? Do we need to revisit all forms of ideology critique and critical thinking to resuscitate a new language of critique and counter-thinking?

This course would engage with the following aspects:
1. Capital in the twenty first century.
2. Spirituality, critique and new communication technologies.
3. Nation and its Fragments and the Birth of New formations.
4. Progressive political Imaginaries and Postcolonial Agency Articulation.
5. Development, Contradictions and Desires of Recolonisation.
6. Language of Undesiring or De-colonisation.
7. New social Uprisings and Language Hope.

The course would also try to address the following:
1. Communication and desire.
2. Desire, capital and dead ends.
3. The effects of (un)desiring: the void, the lack, the pauses.
4. The pro-capitalist mechanics of desire: within the deep interiority of capital.
5. The colonial desiring machine and the traumatic postcolonial rupture.
6. Redeeming and whitening desire: acceleration, pace, speed and technotronics.
7. De vocalizing migrants and the subalterns: the hegemony of the upwardly mobile schizoid class.
8. Third world Labor and desire.
9. Modes of undesiring: Homo-Sacer, bare life and impotence.
10. Fascism, right wing and the politics of desiring.


Course Date : From: 13.03.2017 to 20.03.2017

Participants


This course intends to draw faculty, Mphil and Phd scholars from technical colleges, universities and trans-technical institutes such as IITs and NITs, in particular those working in inter-related domains of humanities, social sciences, law, fine arts and management. However, this course also intends to draw faculty, Mphil and Phd scholars from non-technical government and private colleges, universities and institutions across India and abroad. While the AICTE funds shall meet the expenses of TA, DA, lodging, Lunch and Dinner of the participants from AICTE sponsored colleges, universities and Institutions, the participants from the non-technical government and private colleges, universities and institutions across India are required to pay a registration fee of 2000/


Coordinators


Dr Saswat S Das and Dr Anindya Sekhar Purakaystha who happen to be the coordinators of this course are working in two different places. While the former is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, the latter happens to be an Associate professor in the Department of English, Kazi Nazrul University, West Bengal. The support extended by Prof Anindya Sekhar Purakaystha is purely informal. There is no official collaboration between IIT Kharagpur and Kazi Nazrul Islam University


Saswat.S.Das
Associate Professor
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, 721302
West Bengal, India
Cell no: 09434019044, 07318909158
Emails: ssd@hss.iitkgp.ernet.in
saswatdas.bapi@gmail.com



Speakers


Jean Dreze

Jean Dreze is the author along with Amartya Sen of books such as India and Its Contradictions and India: Development and Participation, etc. He taught in London School of Economics and was member of the National Advisory Council in India.

Dwaipayan Bhattacharya

Dwaipayan Bhattacharya is a Professor in the Centre of political studies and the school of Social Sciences, JNU. His research interest includes Indian Government and Politics, Leftwing Mobilization in Bengal and Democracy.

Ajay Gudavarthy

Ajay Gudavarthy is currently an Assistant Professor in the Center of Political Studies and the School of Social Sciences
His research has been around contemporary developments in Indian democracy after globalization. He is attempting to take a fresh look at the interface between these two currents and at the possibility of theorizing as to how postcolonial theory and liberal politics in India, belong to the same `epistemic community`.

Anjan Chakraborty, Calcutta University

He is a professor in the Department of Economics. He did his Ph.D from University of California, River side

Anup Dhar, Ambedkar University

Anup Dhar was a medical doctor while he was also a keen follower of the political. Both shaped his career. On the one hand, he moved to histories of healing and philosophies of the body and thereafter to mental health, especially post-Foucauldian psychiatry and post-Freudian psychoanalysis. On the other, his passion for non-party political imaginations took him to the interstices of Marxian and feminist perspectives. The question of cultural difference is, however, his present preoccupation. He has a PhD in Philosophy from Jadavpur University, Kolkata

Rajarshi Dasgupta, JNU

He is a D. Phil in Political Science from Oxford University, UK, 2003. He is currently an Assistant Professor Centre for Political Studies, JNU (since October 2008) Formerly Fellow in Political Science, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (October 2004 – September 2008)

Achin Vanayak, Delhi University

He is a professor in the political science Department and his research interest is International Relations-Strategic Studies, Nuclear Weapons and Terrorism, Indian Political Economy, Indian Political System, Issues concerning communalism and secularism

Aditya Nigam

He is a professor in the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, CSDS Aditya Nigam works in the broad field of social and political theory. His work attempts to theorize the experience of politics and democracy by moving away from the standard mainstream frameworks that base themselves on notions of popular will and sovereignty. It therefore, attempts to understand mass politics and notions of populism and the popular with reference to the mundane and the everyday.




Application


Course Date : From: 13.03.2017 to 20.03.2017