A presentation and discussion featuring Partha Chatterjee (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and Anthropology, Columbia University) and comments from Ayça Çubukçu (Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science).

Partha Chatterjee is a Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University and a Professor of Political Science at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta, India. He is a political theorist and historian and divides his time between Columbia University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where he was the Director from 1997 to 2007. A major focus of Partha Chatterjee’s work is nationalism, but in order to follow his thoughts on this topic, one must simultaneously think also of colonialism, post-colonialism, modernity, and the idea of the nation-state, and also summon up, simultaneously with that cluster of concepts, a not-nationalist and counter-colonial viewpoint about what these terms actually represent (or could actually represent), with special reference to India.

His books include: The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (2012); Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (2011); Empire and Nation: Selected Essays 1985-2005 (2010);The Politics of the Governed: Considerations on Political Society in Most of the World (2004); A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (2002); A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism (1997); The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1993). He is also a poet, playwright, and actor.