Painting of two Hindu supplicants (one has their hands folded in reverances and one is sitting in a yogic pose)
Crisis and Culture: The Public Role of a Critical Humanities
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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.

An Impressionistic painting of what looks to be an outdoor scene in shades of pink, orange, and purple.
Picturing South Asians in Victorian Jamaica
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Analyzing the staging and composition of archival photography of South Asian laborers in 19th-century Jamaica, Anna Arabindan-Kesson reflects upon the role of photography in evoking particular colonial narratives about indenture, the perception of Indian laborers’ assimilability, and Jamaica’s modernization.

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