D. Venkat Rao urges for us to conceive the Critical Humanities as a necessary response to a prior humanities that has disavowed enlivened cultural memory. This idea of the Critical Humanities compels us to  think together across contextual borders in order to affirm the web of formations that sustains public engagement within the academic humanities. Rao suggests that universalisms ought to be negotiated through, rather than against, cultural differences and that Saidian frameworks of difference require revisions within non-Western institutions.

In an interview with Arcade, D. Venkat Rao of the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad discusses humanities research and pedagogy in non-Western spaces, particularly classrooms in South Asia.