Dr Debjani Ganguly

Head, Humanities Research Centre

T: ( 02 ) 612 59877

F: ( 02 ) 6248 0054
E: debjani.ganguly@anu.edu.au

Research School of Humanities
College of Arts and Social Sciences

Short biography:

Debjani Ganguly is Head of the Humanities Research Centre (HRC). Previously she was Director, Research Development at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research (CCR), an Australian Research Council Special Research Centre. After completing her PhD in postcolonial literary studies at ANU’s School of Humanities, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the CCR (2002-2004). Prior to taking up her doctoral studies in Australia, Debjani completed a Masters and an MPhil in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Bombay and was a university lecturer in English in Bombay. Debjani is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland and a Board Member of the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI), Duke University, and CLARINS (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure), Utrecht University, Netherlands.

Research Interests:

Debjani’s areas of specialization are postcolonial literary and historical studies and comparative/world literatures in the era of globalization. Her book, Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (Routledge 2005), is both an intellectual history and a revisionist ethnography of caste and untouchability in India from the point of view of theoretical developments in the field of postcolonial studies. By drawing its inspiration from the Subaltern Studies project and its epistemological critique of social scientific and secular historical representations of South Asian life worlds, the book challenges the normative modernity inherent in social science approaches to caste. 'Normative Modernity' is conceptualized in the book as an intellectual orientation that valorises certain ways of belonging in modernity over others. A caste-based society is invariably seen as 'backward' through such a lens. Her book argues that caste is not so much an essence responsible for India's 'backwardness' as a constellation of variegated social practices that are in a constant state of flux and that cannot be completely contained in a narrative of nation-building, modernisation and development. It turns its archival and analytical focus on both caste Hindu and dalit literary, mythographic and spiritual texts, and in the process, illustrates the importance of reading caste as an assemblage of secular and non-secular practices and affects that generate everyday life in India. What is offered in this analysis is not an endorsement of either the caste-system or casteism, but a resistance to the reified ways in which caste continues to figure in social scientific and nation-building discourses.

Debjani recently wrote for and co-edited two other volumes: one on Edward Said, Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual (Melbourne UP, 2007) in which leading Australian and overseas scholars analyze the ways in which humanities and literary studies in particular can engage with the oeuvre of this leading postcolonial humanist in the twenty-first century; the second on the eclectic cosmopolitanism of Gandhian thought and its refractory legacies, Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2007).

Her other areas of research and publication include, language politics in postcolonial India, dalit life stories, South Asian diasporic fiction, cultural histories of mixed race, and the globalization of Bollywood, the popular cinema from Bombay/Mumbai as creative industry.

Current Research Projects:

Debjani's current research projects include:

1. A monograph in progess, Literary Worlds After 1989: Suffering Multitudes, Spectatorial Mediations': a world literature project on Anglophone writing in the post-Cold War period (1989-present) with a focus on transnational works dealing with the global immanence of terror, warfare and genocide.

2. 'Mediated Mobility: India's Low Caste Revolution in the Media Age', an Australian Research Council Discovery project (2009-2011) with Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron.

Project Summary: An outstanding feature of Indian democracy in the last three decades has been the emergence of low caste and dalit (ex-untouchable caste) voices in all spheres of public life. This project is the first comparative and interdisciplinary history of multiple media - print, literary, visual, digital - through which the lower castes have transformed public spheres in late modern India. It compares two regions, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, where lower caste mobilization has historically been most intense. This collective history will 1) recast the story of Indian democracy in terms of the entry of lower castes into the nation's information age and 2) advance global understanding of new media forms in politicization of the oppressed.

Selected Publications:

Books and Monographs

2008 Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds: Postcolonial Perspectives, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2008

2007 Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, co-editor, Melbourne University Press

2007 Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global Perspectives, co-editor, London: Routledge

2005 Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity: Notes on a Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Caste, London: Routledge.

Edited volumes

2007   'Pigments of the Imagination: Theorizing, Performing and Historicizing Mixed Race', coedited with Penny Edwards and Jacqueline Lo, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol. 28, No.1

2005 “Gandhi Nonviolence and Modernity”, co-edited with John Docker, Borderlands, December

2004 “Cultural Politics and Iconography” co-edited with Mandy Thomas, Humanities Research, Vol. 11, No.2, October-November

1999 Impossible Selves: Cultural Readings of Identity, co-edited with J.Lo, D.Beard, R. Cunneen, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing.

1998 Unfinished Journeys: India File from Canberra, co-edited with Kavita Nandan Adelaide: Centre for New Literatures in English, Flinders University.

Chapters in books

2009   'Dalit Life Stories', Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, Cambridge University Press, (in press)

2009   'Orbits of Desire: Bollywood as Creative Industry', in Bollywood in Australia, ed. Andrew Hassam, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2009

2009   'The Language Question in India', Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, ed. Ato Quayson, Cambridge University Press (in press)

2007 “Global State of War and Moral Vernaculars of Nonviolence: Reading Gandhi in a New World Order”, Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global Perspectives, Co-editor, London: Routledge and New Delhi: Orient Longman

2007 “Said, World Literature and Global Comparatism”, Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, eds. D.Ganguly and Ned Curthoys, Melbourne University Press

2007 “Vernacular Cosmopolitans: Gandhi and Ambedkar”, Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality; Global Perspectives, eds. D.Ganguly and John Docker, London: Routledge

2004 "Velutha, Ammu, Death: The Aporia of the Aesthetic", Words for their own Sake: Literature in The Age of Economic Rationalism, eds. Jan Lloyd Jones and Kathie Barnes, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing.

2001 "Between Marx and Foucault, Or 'Whither Subaltern?': Perspectives from South Asian Historiography", in Lim Chee Seng, et al.(eds) Sharing a Commonwealth. Kuala Lampur: ACLALS in Association With The Department of English, University of Malaya.

2000 "The Subaltern in Shadow: Reading Aboriginal Women's Life-Stories" in Adrian Mitchell and Cynthia Vanden Driesen (eds), New Directions in Australian Studies, New Delhi: Prestige Publications.

2000 "Transgressing Sacred Visions: Taslima, Rushdie and the Indian Subcontinent", in Ralph Crane and Radhika Mohanram (eds), Shifting Continents/Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent, Amsterdam: Rodophi.

1999 "Their History, (Y)our Memories: Provincializing Europe in Dalit Historiography", in Jacqueline Lo et al (eds) Impossible Selves: Cultural Readings Of Identity, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing.

1998 "Ruminations and a Preview", in Debjani Ganguly and Kavita Nandan (eds), Unfinished Journeys: India File from Canberra, Adelaide: CRNLE, Flinders.

1998 G.N. Devy: The Nativist as Postcolonial", in Makarand Paranjape (ed.) The Nativist Tradition in Indian Literary Criticism, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.

1996 Of Dreams, Digressions and Dislocations: The Surreal Fiction of Sunetra Gupta", in Viney Kirpal (ed.), The Postmodern Indian English Novel, Bombay: Allied Publishers.

1995 "The Literature of Dispossession: Subversion of Elitist Nationalism in Dalit and Aboriginal Texts", in Phil Butterrs, Caroline Guerin and Amanda Nettlebeck (eds), Crossing Lines: Formations of Australian Culture, Adelaide: Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

Journal articles

2009   'Pain, Personhood and the Collective: Dalit Lifestories', Asian Studies Review, Vo. 33, no. 4, 2009

2008   'Global Literary Refractions: Reading Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters', English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of Literary Studies, Vol. 25, No.1, June

2008   'Literary Globalism in the New Millennium', Postcolonial Studies, Vol.11, No.1

2008   'Tryst with Postcolonial Destiny', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.43, No.7, February

2007   'From Empire to Empire: Writing the Transnational Anglo-Indian Self in Australia', Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol. 28, No.1

2007 '100 Days in Rwanda: Trauma Aesthetics and Humanist Ethics in an Age of Terror', Humanities Research, Vol. 15, No. 2  

2005  'Yet Another English Gift: The Role of English Bhikkus in Indian Dalit Buddhist Conversions, 1970-1990', JSL: Journal of the School of Languages and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, No. 4, Autumn

2004   'Buddha, Bhakti and Superstition: A Post-Secular Reading of Dalit Conversion', Postcolonial Studies, Vol.7, No.1

2002   'History's Implosions: A Benjaminian Reading of Ambedkar', Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol.32, No.3, Fall

2000   'Can the Dalit Speak: Caste, Postcoloniality and the New Humanities', South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 23, Special Issue

Disciplines:

English and Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Studies

Teaching:

Graduate Supervision:

1. Elen Turner, 'Women's Publishing in South Asia and Australasia', Chair of Supervisory panel
2. Jonathan O'Neill, 'New Media, Globalization and Irish Ethnicity', Chair of Supervisory panel
3. Ida Nursoo, ‘In the Waiting Room of Humanity: The Consequence of Kant for Cosmopolitan Futures after Derrida’, Chair of Supervisory panel
4. Diah Agung Esfandari, ‘Javanese Mystical Folklores and Horror Urban Legend Movies’, Chair of Supervisory panel
5. Leigh Toop, RSH, ‘Form, Materiality and Meaning in the Work of Three Thai Installation Artists’ – Chair of Supervisory Panel
6. Visakesa Chandrasekaram, RSH, “Confessions of Tigers: Documenting the impact of Counter-Terrorism Laws and Human Rights Violations in Sri Lanka Through Creative writing”, - Chair
7. Josh Wodak, RSH, “Interrogating Interactive Interfaces: New Media Art” – Chair
8. Hamish Daley, RSH, 'The historical novel in Australia, New Zealand and Nigeria', Supervisor
9. Susan Laganza, RSH, “Ethnopoetics of Death and Mourning” – Supervisor
10. Dawn Mirapuri, English, Faculty of Arts, “Anglophone Arab Women Writers: Voices from the Mashriq and El-Mahjar” – Supervisor, PhD Completed, February 2009.
11. Usha Natarajan, College of Law, “Postcolonial Readings of International Law in the Context of Iraq” – Advisor, PhD completed 2008
12. Simon Choo, RSH, “Malaysian and Australian Food Identities: Migration, Tradition, authenticity and Change” – Chair, PhD completed, 2008
13. Gokcen Karanfil, RSH, “Transnational Media and Diasporic Communities: Reflections on Turkish-Australian Lives” – Supervisor, PhD completed, 2007
14. Timothy Amos, RSPAS, “The Burakumin in Pre-Modern Japan, 1600-1868” – Supervisor, PhD completed, 2006.

Activities:

Media Attention:
3 July, 2007, ABC Radio Interview on British bombings, Muslim protests against Salman Rushdie’s knighthood and the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses
19 April, 2007, ABC Radio Interview on Bollywood poster art exhibitions at NGV, Melbourne and Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and the impact of Bollywood in Australia
18 November, 2006, ABC Radio Interview on Indian film Festival in Perth and ANU-Monash workshop on Bollywood
26 October 2006, ABC Radio Interview on ANU-Monash Bollywood workshop, in the context of the Indian film festival then running.
2 Feb, 2005, Breakfast Radio interview on 3CR Community Radio (Melbourne), topic: "The tsunami and Dalit aid disbursement"

Professional societies:

Fellow, The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland

Member, Advisory Board, CLARINS (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure), Utrecht University, Netherlands.

Member, Advisory Board, The Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI), Duke University.

Member, Modern Languages Association (MLA)

Member, the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS)
Member, Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA)
Member, International PEN (Sydney Chapter)
Indian Representative on the International P.E.N Women Writers' Committee (IPWWC) - 1994 - 2000
Life Member, The Royal Asiatic Society, Bombay, India