Speaking Otherwise Episode 2: Politics and Passions
Channel: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
Date: 05/05/2021

Speaking Otherwise is an academic podcast on the Contemporary, hosted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi.  In this podcast, we speak to well known scholars from the humanities and the social sciences on the critical questions of our times.

Episode 2.  Politics and Passions

In this episode, Prathama Banerjee speaks to Udaya Kumar on the place of passion, emotion and affect in contemporary public life.  The conversation meanders around questions of self, body, sensory, sensation, intensity, stigma, experience, ghosts, viruses and conditions of political existence today.  

Udaya Kumar is Professor at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He works on autobiographical writing; death and contemporary culture; emotions and political life; Malayali literary cultures; vernacular social thought; and cultural histories of the body and the sensory.  His publications include Writing the First Person: Literature, History and Autobiography in Modern Kerala (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2016); The Joycean Labyrinth: Repetition, Time and Tradition in `Ulysses' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, October 1991, rpt. 2001); ‘The Strange Homeliness of the Night: Spectral Speech and the Dalit Present in C. Ayyappan's Writings,’ Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, XVII: 1 and 2 (2010, pub. 2013) pp. 177-91; ‘The Perfect Imperfect: Democracy and the Ethics of Self-ruination,’ Cultural Critique, 105 (Fall 2019), pp. 223-39; ‘The Legibility of Things: Objects and Public Histories in N. S. Madhavan’s Litanies of Dutch Battery,’ in Narratology and Ideology, eds. Divya Dwivedi, Henrik Skov Nielsen & Richard Walsh (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2018), pp. 74-90; and ‘Sovereignty, Allegory and Political Affect: K. Narayana Kurukkal’s Novels,’ in Novel Formations: The Indian Beginnings of a European Genre, eds. Baidik Bhattacharya and Sambudha Sen (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2018), pp. 167-210.