A book talk by renowned feminist scholar and a professor of political thought at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Prof. Nivedita Menon. Book talk followed by conversation with Poulomi Saha, co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.
About the Book:
In Secularism as Misdirection, Nivedita Menon traces how the discourse of secularism fixes attention to and hyper-visualizes women and religion while obscuring other related issues. Showing how secularism is often invoked to serve capital and antiminority politics, Menon exposes it as a strategy of governance that is compatible with both democracy and authoritarianism, capitalism and socialism. Secularism also delegitimizes the nonindividuated nonrational self, Menon argues, and exploring this aspect, tracks the journey of psychoanalysis in the global South. Menon further examines the interconnectedness of religion, caste, the state, and women, showing how the discourse of secularism can also be mobilized by Hindu supremacist politics in India. Menon puts Latin American decolonial theorists in conversation with Asian and African thinkers to examine twenty-first-century global reimaginings of selfhood, constitutionalism, citizenship, and anticapitalist existence. Through a feminist and global perspective, Menon suggests that transformative politics is better imagined by stepping out of the frame offered by secularism and focusing on substantive values such as democracy, social justice, and ecological justice.
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About the Speaker
Nivedita Menon, Professor at Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, is the author of Seeing like a Feminist (2012). Her new book, Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South is forthcoming in 2023 (Permanent Black) and 2024 (Duke University Press). Apart from research papers in Indian and international journals, her previous books are Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law (2004); and (co-written) Power and Contestation: India after 1989 (2007/2nd Edition 2014). She also has two edited volumes Gender and Politics in India (1999) and Sexualities (2007); and a co-edited book Critical Studies in Politics. Exploring Sites, Selves, Power (2014).
She is a regular commentator on contemporary issues on the collective blog kafila.online (of which she is one of the founders), and active in democratic politics in India.
She also has translated fiction and non-fiction from Hindi and Malayalam into English, and from Malayalam into Hindi, and received the AK Ramanujan Award for translation instituted by Katha.
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PARKING INFORMATION
Please note that parking is not always easily available in Berkeley. Take public transportation if possible or arrive early to secure your spot.
Event is FREE and OPEN to the public.
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If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Puneeta Kala at pkala@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.
