For the 2024 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship (RMPP) Lecture, Dr. Philip Kaisary welcomes Dr. Auritro Majumder, University of Houston, for his talk entitled “(Third) World Literature and Decolonization: Humanist Internationalism and Contemporary Literary Studies.”

Please join us on Wednesday, March 20th, 2024, in Patterson 303. Doors open at 4:30 pm, and the lecture begins at 5:30 pm.

This talk discusses the revolutionary genealogies of the third world (1945-1991), exploring both its earlier antecedents and subsequent legacies. While recent scholarship has focused on the mediations around the idea of world literature, from European colonization to US-led globalization, much less discussed are the concepts that were articulated from, and grounded in the realities of, the peripheries and margins of the Euro-US dominated world. Considerations of literature, and culture more broadly, played an enormous role in the mass mobilizations of 19C and 20C decolonization: there also took place significant rethinking of the issues of textuality, forms, and language, as well as the relations between theory and practice, city and country, society and nature, urban middle classes and rural subaltern groups, to mention only a few. In this radical frame, the overall emphasis was on a “new humanism” — drawing on vital but neglected intellectuals of the third world, from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the talk addresses how their humanist work, and vision, speak to the contemporary global situation of the literary humanities.”

Dr. Auritro Majumder is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston and author of Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His current research comprises a book project exploring ideas of the human, “The Global South in Literature and Theory,” and a co-edited anthology, “Cultures of the Cold War in South Asia.”

Majumder has authored over a dozen essays, appearing in academic journals including Critical Asian Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Interventions, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Mediations, Research in African Literatures, and South Asian Review.