Department of English

• Friday, October 30, 2015 - 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Grad lounge (FBH 330)

Mukti Lakhi Mangharam works on expressions of the modern and human rights in Hindu epics and devotional verse, South African folk tales and praise poetry, and "global" human rights novels.

Description: Historical accounts of democratic modernity in India usually characterize it as originating in Europe with and through capitalism, which were both then imported into colonized societies through colonial civilizing missions. This paper contests the conflation of the universalizing force of capitalism with the abstract Enlightenment universalisms that drive representative change. While capitalism connects human beings to each other predominantly within materialist practices of commodity exchange and through its expansion into new markets, and does so towards the end of accumulating capital, Enlightenment universalisms are universalizing through a whole range of diverse cognitive frameworks and material arrangements. Moreover, understanding the differences between capitalism’s universalizing force and the 'universal humans' underlying democratic cultures and institutions opens up the possibility of tracing many more comparable non-capitalist and non-Enlightenment local universalisms in the literary traditions of the Global South. These other universalisms, which Professor Mangharam calls contextual universalisms, exceed the hegemony of capitalism and work with Enlightenment universalisms to provide local models of democratic. This paper will explore one such contextual universalism in the anti-caste protest poetry of the Indian Dalit activist group, the Kabir Kala Manch.

Co-sponsored by the South Asia Center.