Auritro Majumder delivered a lecture on ‘Beyond Decoloniality: Humanist Intellectuals and The Politics of Culture’. It was chaired by Baidik Bhattacharya.
ZOOM ID: 89282049196 PASSCODE: csdsdelhi
While theories of decoloniality have gained wide traction in the humanities recently, especially as a means of resisting Eurocentrism, their origins in 20C conservative European thought are much less discussed. This talk illustrates how contemporary buzzwords -- such as the "decolonial" -- obscure the actual contestations around the Enlightenment and modernity, as well as the contributions of "global South" humanist intellectuals. The latter, as I show, viewed modernity as a shared if uneven global process; moreover, their understanding of the past was shaped by an anticolonial ethos fundamentally distinct from the decolonial.
Auritro Majumder is Associate Professor of English at University of Houston, specializing in world literature, intellectual history, and critical theory. He is the author of Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery, and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to British Literature and Empire, both from Cambridge University Press.
Baidik Bhattacharya is Associate Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Friday, 16 January 2026, 4 pm, Seminar Room and Zoom https://bit.ly/3YF1svr
