Kris Manjapra | Tufts University (original) (raw)
Books by Kris Manjapra
Papers by Kris Manjapra
Theory, Culture & Society, 2019
The core concept of 'the human' that anchors so many humanities disciplines-history, literature, ... more The core concept of 'the human' that anchors so many humanities disciplines-history, literature, art history, philosophy, religion, anthropology, political theory, and others-issues from a very particular modern European definition of Man 'over-represented' as the human. The history of modernity and of modern disciplinary knowledge formations are, in this sense, a history of modern European forms monopolizing the definition of the human and placing other variations at a distance from the human. This article is an interdisciplinary research that decenters Man-as-human as the subject/object of inquiry, and proposes a relational analytic that reframes established orthodoxies of area, geography, history and temporality. It also involves new readings of traditional archives, finding alternative repositories and practices of knowledge and collection to radically redistribute our ways of understanding the meaning of the human.
Social Text, 2019
In 2015 the British government finally finished paying off the Slavery Abolition Act loan. For 18... more In 2015 the British government finally finished paying off the Slavery Abolition Act loan. For 180 years it had serviced debt created by the massive public borrowing of 1835, which was used to compensate British slave owners for the loss of their “slave property” during emancipation. This article interrogates this 180-year-long debt legacy and argues for the need to recast our understanding of emancipation processes within the frame of racial capitalism. The article specifically considers the financial dimension of emancipation as constituting an apparatus of what is termed necrospeculation. The accounting procedures of British slave emancipation appropriated financial value not just from living enslaved bodies but also from dead and absent ones. The British state oversaw and directed an intergenerational regime that plundered wealth from enslaved black communities and their descendants to enrich the accounts of Britain’s racial capitalist imperial order. The study concludes with a reading of Maxwell Philip’s 1854 novel Emmanuel Appadocca as a reflection on the potentials of black redress and black critique from within the necrospeculative order of colonial postslavery. The author argues that “postslavery” is in fact not a past historical period but a critical designation of the social and relational terms of our present.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2018
This essay is a thematic and methodological introduction to the Bengali Intellectuals Oral Histor... more This essay is a thematic and methodological introduction to the
Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project. This interpretive oral history
collection reckons with and complicates the over-representation
of Bengalis in the study of South Asian intellectual history. As
editors, we propose a new framework to study intellectual life in
the period of decolonisation—the study of Third World humanities
from South Asian perspectives. We situate West Bengal and
Bangladesh as important, but obviously not exclusive, vantage
points from which to explore formations of Third World thought
from the 1940s to the 1980s. Methods in oral history collecting
and curation help us to comprehend the intelligibility of Third
World humanities expressed from regionally grounded, and diasporically
mobile, South Asian perspectives.
This is a review article of four new books on plantation histories of Asia which offer a sophisti... more This is a review article of four new books on plantation histories of Asia which offer a sophisticated analysis of the configurations of liberal imperialism, colonial capitalism, and the construction of post-colonial nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The works discussed here are Rana Behal
The Global Travel of Agricultural Racial Capitalism
This essay provides a close study of the international horizons of Kallol, a Bengali literary jou... more This essay provides a close study of the international horizons of Kallol, a Bengali literary journal, published in post-World War I Calcutta. It uncovers a historical pattern of Bengali intellectual life that marked the period from the 1870s to the 1920s, whereby an imperial imagination was transformed into an international one, as a generation of intellectuals born between 1885 and 1905 reinvented the political category of “youth”. Hermeneutics, as a philosophically informed study of how meaning is created through conversation, and grounded in this essay in the thought of Hans Georg Gadamer, helps to reveal this pattern. While translocal vistas of intellectual life were always present in Bengali thought, the contours of those horizons changed drastically in the period under study. Bengali intellectual life, framed within a center–periphery imperial axis in the 1870s, was resolutely reframed within a multipolar international constellation by the 1920s. This change was reflected by the new conversations in which young Bengalis became entangled in the years after the war. At a linguistic level, the shift was registered by the increasing use of terms such as bideś (the foreign) and āntarjātik (international), as opposed to bilāt (England, or the West), to name the world abroad. The world outside empire increasingly became a resource and theme for artists and writers. Major changes in global geopolitical alignments and in the colonial politics of British India, and the relations between generations within Bengali bhadralok society, provide contexts for the rise of this international youth imagination.
Journal of Global History, Jan 1, 2006
Page 1. The illusions of encounter: Muslim 'minds' and Hindu revolution... more Page 1. The illusions of encounter: Muslim 'minds' and Hindu revolutionaries in First World War Germany and after Kris K. Manjapra Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 27 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA E-mail: manjapra@fas.harvard.edu ...
Theory, Culture & Society, 2019
The core concept of 'the human' that anchors so many humanities disciplines-history, literature, ... more The core concept of 'the human' that anchors so many humanities disciplines-history, literature, art history, philosophy, religion, anthropology, political theory, and others-issues from a very particular modern European definition of Man 'over-represented' as the human. The history of modernity and of modern disciplinary knowledge formations are, in this sense, a history of modern European forms monopolizing the definition of the human and placing other variations at a distance from the human. This article is an interdisciplinary research that decenters Man-as-human as the subject/object of inquiry, and proposes a relational analytic that reframes established orthodoxies of area, geography, history and temporality. It also involves new readings of traditional archives, finding alternative repositories and practices of knowledge and collection to radically redistribute our ways of understanding the meaning of the human.
Social Text, 2019
In 2015 the British government finally finished paying off the Slavery Abolition Act loan. For 18... more In 2015 the British government finally finished paying off the Slavery Abolition Act loan. For 180 years it had serviced debt created by the massive public borrowing of 1835, which was used to compensate British slave owners for the loss of their “slave property” during emancipation. This article interrogates this 180-year-long debt legacy and argues for the need to recast our understanding of emancipation processes within the frame of racial capitalism. The article specifically considers the financial dimension of emancipation as constituting an apparatus of what is termed necrospeculation. The accounting procedures of British slave emancipation appropriated financial value not just from living enslaved bodies but also from dead and absent ones. The British state oversaw and directed an intergenerational regime that plundered wealth from enslaved black communities and their descendants to enrich the accounts of Britain’s racial capitalist imperial order. The study concludes with a reading of Maxwell Philip’s 1854 novel Emmanuel Appadocca as a reflection on the potentials of black redress and black critique from within the necrospeculative order of colonial postslavery. The author argues that “postslavery” is in fact not a past historical period but a critical designation of the social and relational terms of our present.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2018
This essay is a thematic and methodological introduction to the Bengali Intellectuals Oral Histor... more This essay is a thematic and methodological introduction to the
Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project. This interpretive oral history
collection reckons with and complicates the over-representation
of Bengalis in the study of South Asian intellectual history. As
editors, we propose a new framework to study intellectual life in
the period of decolonisation—the study of Third World humanities
from South Asian perspectives. We situate West Bengal and
Bangladesh as important, but obviously not exclusive, vantage
points from which to explore formations of Third World thought
from the 1940s to the 1980s. Methods in oral history collecting
and curation help us to comprehend the intelligibility of Third
World humanities expressed from regionally grounded, and diasporically
mobile, South Asian perspectives.
This is a review article of four new books on plantation histories of Asia which offer a sophisti... more This is a review article of four new books on plantation histories of Asia which offer a sophisticated analysis of the configurations of liberal imperialism, colonial capitalism, and the construction of post-colonial nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The works discussed here are Rana Behal
The Global Travel of Agricultural Racial Capitalism
This essay provides a close study of the international horizons of Kallol, a Bengali literary jou... more This essay provides a close study of the international horizons of Kallol, a Bengali literary journal, published in post-World War I Calcutta. It uncovers a historical pattern of Bengali intellectual life that marked the period from the 1870s to the 1920s, whereby an imperial imagination was transformed into an international one, as a generation of intellectuals born between 1885 and 1905 reinvented the political category of “youth”. Hermeneutics, as a philosophically informed study of how meaning is created through conversation, and grounded in this essay in the thought of Hans Georg Gadamer, helps to reveal this pattern. While translocal vistas of intellectual life were always present in Bengali thought, the contours of those horizons changed drastically in the period under study. Bengali intellectual life, framed within a center–periphery imperial axis in the 1870s, was resolutely reframed within a multipolar international constellation by the 1920s. This change was reflected by the new conversations in which young Bengalis became entangled in the years after the war. At a linguistic level, the shift was registered by the increasing use of terms such as bideś (the foreign) and āntarjātik (international), as opposed to bilāt (England, or the West), to name the world abroad. The world outside empire increasingly became a resource and theme for artists and writers. Major changes in global geopolitical alignments and in the colonial politics of British India, and the relations between generations within Bengali bhadralok society, provide contexts for the rise of this international youth imagination.
Journal of Global History, Jan 1, 2006
Page 1. The illusions of encounter: Muslim 'minds' and Hindu revolution... more Page 1. The illusions of encounter: Muslim 'minds' and Hindu revolutionaries in First World War Germany and after Kris K. Manjapra Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 27 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA E-mail: manjapra@fas.harvard.edu ...