TALKDravidian History: The Transimperial Journeys of a Linguistic, Political, and Racial Artefact

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OUTLINE

Léopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, in former French West Africa, articulated a distinct world civilizational history, centered in ancient Egypt with offshoots in West Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Oceania. His identification of a deep connection between West Africans and Dravidians of South India led to the creation of an Indo-African Studies department at universities in Senegal and India; his collaboration with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi revealed a shared African-Asian interest in non-Western intellectual paradigms.
This presentation traces the historical evolution of Dravidian history beyond British India and German philology across empires—from the Portuguese to the French—and its use in postcolonial African cultural and political discourses that challenged Eurocentrism and exclusionary nationalism in newly independent nations.

Date: July 9 (Tue), 2024
Time: 16:30-17:30
Venue: Doshisha University, Karasuma Campus, Shikoukan SK201 (hybrid)
Speaker: Shobana Shankar (Stony Brook, State University of New York)

Organizer: Center for Transimperial History
Co-organizer: Research group “Racism and Colonialism” under Global Mediterranean project
Co-organaizer: Research Unit 13, Institute for Study of Humanities and Social Sciences, Doshisha University

BIO

Shobana Shankar is Professor of History at Stony Brook, State University of New York. Her research focuses on colonial and postcolonial West Africa and Africa-South Asia networks and covers themes related to religious and racial politics, humanitarianism, history of health and disease, intellectual history, and critical development studies. She recently was Africa Program Fellow at the Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she worked on her next book on centuries-old informal economies and the making of multidirectional migration of people, goods, and ideas between Nigeria and India. This book builds in new directions from her book An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race, published by Hurst/Oxford in 2021. It is the first history of how race and racialization have brought Africans and Indians together, yet also driven them apart; it was shortlisted as a finalist for the P. Sterling Stuckey Prize of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora and the International Studies Association’s Global Development Section Book Award.
(cited from the personal web page of State University of New York)

CONTACT

Satoshi MIZUTANI (Doshisha University, Faculty of Global and Regional Studies)
mizutanis0606@gmail.com