KÄTE HAMBURGER LECTURE WITH TRINANKUR BANERJEE
WHEN
WHERE
Innovation Center A2 1, Seminarraum 0.01
Universität des Saarlandes
LANGUAGE
ENGLISH
PROGRAMME
The Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE) and the CEUS | Cluster for European Studies warmly invite you to attend the next Käte Hamburger Lecture at Saarland University. This series allows fellows from the centre to share their latest research perspectives on cultural practices of reparation. After the lectures, audience members will have the opportunity to engage with key topics in more detail during a public discussion session.
Trinankur Banerjee: Routines of Survival: Popular Comedy, Dispossession, and Repair in the Postcolony
How does popular comedy in the postcolony offer a grammar of repair when a cataclysmic event of dispossession leaves millions without an infrastructure of reparation? The lecture seeks to answer that by drawing on the popular comic forms emerging from the historical vortex of post-Partition India. Against the common dismissal of comic forms as politically inefficacious and culturally frivolous, I argue that their attention to quotidian inconveniences and inequities in absence of socioeconomic reparation indexed granular dimensions of polity formations amid anti-refugee sentiments. Focusing on two Bengali classics, Sare Chuattor and Jamalaye Jibanta Manush, I show how imaginaries of mutuality and justice remain ensconced in these “frivolous” texts. Distilling certain comic tropes immanent to the mediations of the post-Partition quotidian, the lecture proposes “routine” as an analytic to conceptualize how ordinary forms of repair acquired a tropic dimension in such comic forms.
The Käte Hamburger Lectures provide deeper insight into the centre’s ongoing research, convey these ideas to the wider university community, and invite the public to engage in meaningful discussions on cultural practices of reparation.
Live Lecture Broadcast
The lecture will be broadcast live via Microsoft Teams on July 14 starting at 6:00 p.m. with the lecture starting no later than 6:15 p.m. You can find the link for online participation here.