Speaker: Dr. Poulomi Saha, University of California, Berkeley, USA.

Abstract:

In 1931, in honor of Sigmund Freud’s 75th birthday, the Indian Psychoanalytical Society sent him the gift of an ivory Vishnu statuette. The statuette, Freud wrote in thanks, would for as long as he lived, “recall to [his] mind the progress of psychoanalysis, the proud conquestit has made in foreign countries.” In its elliptical appearances in the writings of Freud and H.D. both, the Vishnu is curiously abstracted into an object of refere ntial possibility. This paper insists on restoring to the statuette its materiality to reveal the imbrication of social, economic, and epistemological histories upon its body. Indeed, this focus on the materiality of the object is itself a comparativist reading practice: the statuette’s itinerary of manufacture, ornamentation, and valuation traverses three continents, limning the contours of an expansive transimperial network from East Africa to South Asia to Western Europe.This is a mode of reading that engages the global by way of the local, suggesting the two as palimpsestically adhered as the growing detail upon the Vishnu’s form.

Poulomi Saha is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses in postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality theory, and ethnic American literature. Her research and teaching agenda spans eastward and forward from the late 19th century decline of British colonial rule in the Indian Ocean through to the Pacific and the rise of American global power and domestic race relations in the 20th century. Professor Saha is interested in developing an expansive view of empire and of what constitutes Anglophone literature, routed not primarily through Great Britain and Western Europe but rather through circuits of affiliation and encounter between Asia and the Americas.She is currently completing her first monograph, "Imperial Attachments: Gender, Nation, and the Sciences of Subjectivity in Colonial and Postcolonial Bengal.”