Aishwary Kumar: "Revolution and finitude: Ambedkar’s Samata"
Department: European Languages and Studies
Date and Time: November 12, 2015 | 5:00 PM-7:00 PMEvent Location: Humanities Gateway 1010
Event Details
Join us for a talk with Aishwary Kumar, assistant professor of history at Stanford University.
Aishwary Kumar (assistant professor of history, Stanford University) is an intellectual and political historian of South Asia. He works in areas of modern legal and political thought, political philosophy and democratic culture, religion, caste, and moral psychology, and global histories of empire, constitutionalism, and citizenship. His essays have appeared in Modern Intellectual History, Public Culture, Seminar, and Social History, among other places. Kumar's more recent work has examined the relationship between religious conceptions of freedom and the ethics of democratic dissent in the modern nonwest, with an emphasis on the transformation of liberal categories over the last two centuries. On these, he has recently published his first book, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). He is now completing, on the relationship between revolutionary mysticism and radical democracy, his second book, A Different Force: Ambedkar beyond Measure. Two related studies on the genealogy of what Georges Dumézil had called, in his transwar work Mitra-Varuna (1940/48), “Indo-European representations of sovereignty,” are also underway. The first, The Weight of Truth, examines the kinship between courage and secrecy in republican politics and poetics. The second, The Figure of the Noncitizen, probes the relationship between animality, place, and freedom in 19th and 20th century nationalist and constituent thought.
Aishwary Kumar (assistant professor of history, Stanford University) is an intellectual and political historian of South Asia. He works in areas of modern legal and political thought, political philosophy and democratic culture, religion, caste, and moral psychology, and global histories of empire, constitutionalism, and citizenship. His essays have appeared in Modern Intellectual History, Public Culture, Seminar, and Social History, among other places. Kumar's more recent work has examined the relationship between religious conceptions of freedom and the ethics of democratic dissent in the modern nonwest, with an emphasis on the transformation of liberal categories over the last two centuries. On these, he has recently published his first book, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). He is now completing, on the relationship between revolutionary mysticism and radical democracy, his second book, A Different Force: Ambedkar beyond Measure. Two related studies on the genealogy of what Georges Dumézil had called, in his transwar work Mitra-Varuna (1940/48), “Indo-European representations of sovereignty,” are also underway. The first, The Weight of Truth, examines the kinship between courage and secrecy in republican politics and poetics. The second, The Figure of the Noncitizen, probes the relationship between animality, place, and freedom in 19th and 20th century nationalist and constituent thought.