Kumkum Sangari
Kumkum Sangari is the William F. Vilas Research Professor of English and the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
She has been a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; a Visiting Fellow at Yale University, Delhi University and Jadavpur University; and a Visiting Professor at University of Chicago, Central European University, University of London (SOAS), University of Erfurt and Ambedkar University.
Dr. Sangari has published extensively on British, American and Indian literature, the gendering of South Asian medieval devotional traditions, nationalist figures such as M.K.Gandhi, Bombay cinema, televisual memory, feminist art practice, and several contemporary gender issues such as personal law, widow immolation, domestic labour, the beauty industry, son selection, commercial surrogacy, and communal violence.
She is the author of Solid Liquid: A transnational reproductive formation (2015) and Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narratives, Colonial English (1999).
She has co-edited several books including Recasting Women and, most recently, has edited Arc Silt Dive: The Works of Sheba Chhachhi (2016) and Trace Retrace: Paintings, Nilima Sheikh (2013).
She has been a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; a Visiting Fellow at Yale University, Delhi University and Jadavpur University; and a Visiting Professor at University of Chicago, Central European University, University of London (SOAS), University of Erfurt and Ambedkar University.
Dr. Sangari has published extensively on British, American and Indian literature, the gendering of South Asian medieval devotional traditions, nationalist figures such as M.K.Gandhi, Bombay cinema, televisual memory, feminist art practice, and several contemporary gender issues such as personal law, widow immolation, domestic labour, the beauty industry, son selection, commercial surrogacy, and communal violence.
She is the author of Solid Liquid: A transnational reproductive formation (2015) and Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narratives, Colonial English (1999).
She has co-edited several books including Recasting Women and, most recently, has edited Arc Silt Dive: The Works of Sheba Chhachhi (2016) and Trace Retrace: Paintings, Nilima Sheikh (2013).
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Papers by Kumkum Sangari
This essay examines Asian/Eurasian prenational cosmopolitanism and aesthetics of circulation that bifurcate into discrete histories in Europe and South Asia, Mughal painting as a node of conjunction and vector of circulation, and the paradoxical element of floralism and medieval masculinity, reexamines both the secular and the modern, proposes a lineage for them in the (un)lived potentials of these histories, and attempts to situate Nilima Sheikh's work in a contemporaneity that eludes standard periodization.
The essay also sees Nilima Sheikh's work in the context of the women's movement, the problematics and projects of feminist figuration in the thematization of affect, experience. domestic labour and the female body as well as beauty, violence and national belonging; and the joint implication of artisanal modes and feminist collectivities in matters of self-staging, signature and self-possession. The historical, contemporary and aesthetic implications of Nilima's formal devices (especially stencils) and her grammar of reference that loops into aesthetics of circulation and intensities of mediation, together compose a resonant affective constellation.
This essay examines the leverage of capitalism and the anthropocene in the contemporary context. It looks at the relationship between nature, time scales, durations, body, biosphere, place, land, sky, sand, coal, soil, fossils with an emphasis on geo-historical archives, feminist art and Sheba Chhachhi's works. The essay discusses representations of Asia, aviaries, elephants, digital multiples, the feminist copy and the tangible gift.
Books by Kumkum Sangari
Broadly emphasizing forms, ideologies and class relations, Sangari's essays crisscross and cohere around several themes: the politics of social location and the connection between local, metropolitan and colonial geographies as they bear on debates about the nature of knowledge; the transnational and regional production of ideologies such as altruism under the aegis of colonialism; ways of theorizing women's labour, literacy and consent to patriarchal arrangements and dominant ideologies.
Sangari's analysis of Indian English and the relationships between 'literature' and the non-literary change, the way we consider the divisions between the metropolitan and the sub-continental. In her discussion of capitalism and colonialism, her egalitarian feminist viewpoint opens up and questions issues of cultural autonomy and hybridity. She also critiques the impact of race, caste, class, religion and misogyny on patriarchal ideology and its effect on women.
The 'politics of the possible' mapped by these essays presents itself in several areas: as a more sensitive feminist historiography; as the social potential for secular activity in seemingly impossible situations; in the historical possibilities that were offered by situations not doomed to inevitable outcomes; and as the elements of resistance produced by the contradictions of different structures of oppression..
A refreshing and wide-ranging approach to the study of South Asian politics.
This essay examines Asian/Eurasian prenational cosmopolitanism and aesthetics of circulation that bifurcate into discrete histories in Europe and South Asia, Mughal painting as a node of conjunction and vector of circulation, and the paradoxical element of floralism and medieval masculinity, reexamines both the secular and the modern, proposes a lineage for them in the (un)lived potentials of these histories, and attempts to situate Nilima Sheikh's work in a contemporaneity that eludes standard periodization.
The essay also sees Nilima Sheikh's work in the context of the women's movement, the problematics and projects of feminist figuration in the thematization of affect, experience. domestic labour and the female body as well as beauty, violence and national belonging; and the joint implication of artisanal modes and feminist collectivities in matters of self-staging, signature and self-possession. The historical, contemporary and aesthetic implications of Nilima's formal devices (especially stencils) and her grammar of reference that loops into aesthetics of circulation and intensities of mediation, together compose a resonant affective constellation.
This essay examines the leverage of capitalism and the anthropocene in the contemporary context. It looks at the relationship between nature, time scales, durations, body, biosphere, place, land, sky, sand, coal, soil, fossils with an emphasis on geo-historical archives, feminist art and Sheba Chhachhi's works. The essay discusses representations of Asia, aviaries, elephants, digital multiples, the feminist copy and the tangible gift.
Broadly emphasizing forms, ideologies and class relations, Sangari's essays crisscross and cohere around several themes: the politics of social location and the connection between local, metropolitan and colonial geographies as they bear on debates about the nature of knowledge; the transnational and regional production of ideologies such as altruism under the aegis of colonialism; ways of theorizing women's labour, literacy and consent to patriarchal arrangements and dominant ideologies.
Sangari's analysis of Indian English and the relationships between 'literature' and the non-literary change, the way we consider the divisions between the metropolitan and the sub-continental. In her discussion of capitalism and colonialism, her egalitarian feminist viewpoint opens up and questions issues of cultural autonomy and hybridity. She also critiques the impact of race, caste, class, religion and misogyny on patriarchal ideology and its effect on women.
The 'politics of the possible' mapped by these essays presents itself in several areas: as a more sensitive feminist historiography; as the social potential for secular activity in seemingly impossible situations; in the historical possibilities that were offered by situations not doomed to inevitable outcomes; and as the elements of resistance produced by the contradictions of different structures of oppression..
A refreshing and wide-ranging approach to the study of South Asian politics.