D. Venkat Rao | Critical Humanities Elsewhere: Towards Pathways of a Responsive Reception

Teaching and research in the humanities in countries like India is a European legacy, a barely secularized heritage that is little more than Christian anthropology. This heritage has seldom received any questioning beyond the European political-social-historical methods from cultures that faced and survived colonialism. It should be possible to unravel the legacy, without alibi, from the receiving ends (of the institutions of humanities) of the humanities elsewhere. Is such a discourse a cultural universal? Do all cultures consolidate their reflections of being "human" in such a discourse?  What kind of cultural forms are likely to emerge in cultures where the conception of human essence is not privileged? How is the relation between modes of being and forms of reflection articulated in such cultures? 

The task of Critical Humanities is to explore the ways in which the question of being human (along with non-human others) today can be undertaken from heterogeneous cultural "backgrounds" that pulsate the planet from elsewhere. In India today, for instance, millions of students study humanities in thousands of higher education institutions. The student composition is markedly heterogeneous as the students come from divergent bio-cultural formations (called jātis). The future of the humanities in India is contingent upon the exploration of the cultural forms (in image, music, text and performative formats) of these divergent and countless communities. The cultural legacies of these communities pose fundamental questions concerning the relation among cultural forms and communication technologies (ranging from oral to digital); these legacies compel one to confront the challenge of "lively archives." In other words, the unraveling of the legacy can take place with the risky task of configuring cultural difference from non-European locations beyond the regional discourses of ethnology and history. 

This talk on Critical Humanities moves with the hypothesis that cultural difference can be configured on the basis of differential articulations of memory. The hypothesis can be extended further to unravel the singular and distinctive departures that the Greek-Abrahamic and Sanskrit heritages have taken from the (supposedly) common source of the "Indo-European" background.  Such an inquiry, however, may emerge from cultures that are "outside in" the European fold.  Working from this double bind, this talk draws on the "Indian"—Sanskrit—(symbolizing and biocultural) resources to reflect on the question of cultural difference between "India" and Europe in the praxial context of teaching and research today. 
 

About the Speaker

D. Venkat Rao teaches at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. His areas of interest include literary and cultural studies, image studies, epic traditions, visual cultures, comparative thought, translation, and mnemocultures. 

Rao studied at the Kakatiya University, Warangal, and the University of Kent at Canterbury. He did postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington, Seattle. He has taught at various universities in India and at the University of Washington. In addition to books in English and Telugu, he has published several articles in national and international journals. Rao's recent work includes India, Europe and the Question of Cultural Difference (Routledge, 2021); Performative Reflections of Indian Traditions: Towards a Liveable Learning (Springer, 2021); and Critical Humanities from India: Contexts, Issues, Futures (Routledge, 2018). Other publications include Cultures of Memory in South Asia (Springer, 2014), and In Citations: Readings in Area Studies of Culture (1999), a translation of Ashis Nandy’s Intimate Enemy into Telugu (2005). Earlier he translated into English a Telugu intellectual autobiography called The Last Brahmin (2007, 2012, 2017). He has a full-length work on literary-cultural criticism in Telugu entitled Saamskritika Chaanakyaalu (2005). He is the editor of the Routledge book series on Critical Humanities Across Cultures.

Rao's forthcoming work is titled Envisioning Voice and the Aphasic Ears: Of Sanskrit Reflective Traditions Today (Bloomsbury).  He has designed several courses interfacing areas of culture, technology and literary, cultural studies and the Sanskrit traditions as well as a research program under the rubric of Critical Humanities. 
 

About the Series

All This Rising: The Humanities in the Next Ten Years features ideas and methods that will mark new paths for the humanities in the next decade. Visitors consider the motives and conventions of their work in progress, how it converses with its discipline, and what it portends for the humanities.

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