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.

Note: This is a preliminary bibliography with no claims to comprehensiveness. Please feel free to contact the colloquy curators with reading recommendations. Our aim is to collaboratively create a robust bibliography.

Jenny Sharpe considers the visual power of the imperial picturesque. Analyzing touristic photography of Indian field workers in the Caribbean, Sharpe argues that a “coolie picturesque” simultaneously reveals and conceals the permanent settlement of Indians and their racial mixing with Afro-Jamaicans.

Yousuf Saeed, Co-founder and project director of Tasveer Ghar, and International Visiting Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, reflects on digitizing and archiving South Asian bazaar art, and the question of the intellectual property and community ownership of popular art at Tasveer Ghar.

 Two US-based South Asian drag queens, Faluda Islam and LaWhore Vagistan, discuss the aesthetics of their practices: pastiche as a mode of re-making the world; death as well as conviviality as strategies in drag; camp theory in relation to race and ethnicity; and “queer Muslim futures.” This talk was curated and moderated by Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.