Making Postcolonial Bodies: Tales from An"Other" Enlightenment

color photo of Banu Subramaniam
Speaker: 
Banu Subramaniam, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Event Date: 
March 12, 2018
Event Time: 
4:00pm to 6:00pm
Location: 
1014 Tisch Hall
Event Accessibility : 
Ramp access and power doors are located at the South entrance, on the side of the building closest to the UM Museum of Art. Once inside the South entrance, the elevator is on the left through the double doors. Room 1014 is up one flight (above ground level).
Event Tags: 
cosponsored event
feminist science studies
color photo of Banu Subramaniam

This talk explores how science and religion come together in in contemporary Hindu nationalism to create a very particular and powerful biopolitical imaginary. Religious nationalists have selectively, and strategically, used rhetoric from both science and Hinduism, modernity and orthodoxy, western and eastern thought to build a powerful but potentially dangerous vision of a Hindu nation. With aspirations for a global and modern Hinduism, scientific and religious practices in contemporary India are inextricably interconnected and result in fluid processes and practices of both institutions. The case of India reminds us about both the transnational stakes of science as well as the local instantiations that challenge enlightenment narratives of reason and unreason. Ultimately to understand contemporary technoscience in India, we need new epistemological and methodological tools, and story-making practices to make visible the many phantasmogoric natural and cultural worlds within.

Presented by the Science, Technology & Society program (STS). Cosponsored by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Women's Studies Department, and the Center for South Asian Studies.