Dr. Anupama Mohan, from Presidency University, Kolkata will be delivering a seminar titled "Adaptive Modernities: Literature and the Other Arts". 

Abstract:

What is the modern? It is the inescapable question of our times, and one that is the locus vivendi of our literatures and critical methodologies. In my talk, I want to look at this question in a heteromorphous way: through the examples of Geoffrey Bawa's architecture and Amitav Ghosh's writings, I will try to understand modernity in South Asia as an illustration of the ways in which the term has had distinct historical and cultural trajectories in the global South. In my reading of two "texts," one architectural/spatial and the other ethnographic/literary, I hope to offer a move that eschews the proleptic logic that connects modernism to postmodernism in Anglophone literatures. By understanding modernity as modus in the modernus, it is possible to break away from its monolithic, Western/ized avatar and see it as part of what Enrique Dussel has called "trans-modernity," a concept that allows us in South Asia to think in more rewarding ways of how our varied literatures respond to and shape the discourse of modernity in the new century. 

About the Speaker:

Anupama Mohan is Assistant Professor of English at Presidency University, Kolkata. She completed her doctorate at the University of Toronto in 2010 and published a monograph, *Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures*, with Palgrave Macmillan UK in 2012. She writes and teaches in the broad areas of postcolonial studies, the history of ideas, critical theory, and cultural studies. She has published with the University of Toronto Quarterly, Intersections, and Postcolonial Text. She is the author of a volume of poetry, Twenty Odd Love Poems, published by The Writer's Workshop in 2008.