Neetu Khanna is an associate professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California (USC). Neetu is a comparative literary scholar of South Asia and specializes in theories and literatures of decolonization, global marxisms, postcolonial literature and theory, materialist aesthetics, and queer and feminist theory. Her research in the global literatures of decolonization focuses on one of the central questions animating their political movements and transnational solidarities: how might literature and art disrupt and recondition the emotive sensibilities that sustain empire and their legacies?

Spotlight Talk: „The Visceral Logics of Decolonization”

29th May 02.45 – 03.30 pm | Neetu Khanna

This talk discusses my recent book, The Visceral Logics of Decolonization (Duke UP, 2020), which rethinks decolonization by exploring a knotted set of relations between embodied experience and political feelings –– a set of relations I anatomize as visceral. Theorizing affects, from nationalist ecstasy to the erotics of colonial disgust, my project draws a postcolonial critique into the orbit of affect studies by studying visceral reactions through the political forces that produce them. I take as my primary case study an understudied archive of Muslim internationalist art and literature from the 1930’s through the 1960s as an experimental staging ground for the study of racialized emotion. I theorize the visceral as a critical dimension of Marxian theories of revolutionary consciousness, as they emerge in the moments of decolonization and the rise of modern nationalism.