Elizabeth Povinelli in Conversation with Amit Baishya

In this podcast organized by Borderlines South Asia editor Rishav Thakur, Professor Amit Baishya poses questions to Elizabeth Povinelli —whose works have influenced his own writing — to draw out and think through some of these themes of mutual interest.

Elizabeth Povinelli is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies in Columbia University in the City of New York. Her research has focused on developing a critical theory of late settler liberalism, that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. This thinking has unfolded across several books, numerous essays, and a thirty-five year long collaboration with her Indigenous colleagues in north Australia including, most recently, six films they have created as members of the Karrabing Film Collective. [1]

Amit Baishya is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma. He writes about political terror, survival and the Anthropocene drawing on film and literature from South Asia. He also translates short stories and novels from Assamese to English and his translation of Debendranath Acharya’s Jangam on the “forgotten long march” of Indians from Burma during World War II was released in 2018. 

As such, both Elizabeth Povinelli and Amit Baishya not only transgress disciplinary boundaries and engage seamlessly across anthropology, comparative literature, critical theory and philosophy in their academic endeavors; but they also work with film-making and literary translation in their broad intellectual engagements with the worlds that they care about. 

Read the conversation soon on www.borderlines-cssaame.org