PCI
Fall Lecture 2013 – Doing Gender Lecture
Prof. Bishnupriya
Ghosh (University of California, Santa
Barbara, USA)
Professor
of English
The lecture is organised by the Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI) hosted by the Centre for the Humanities and jointly organised with the Gender Studies Programme at Utrecht University.
“The Saint of the Gutters": Mother Teresa as Corporeal Aperture
·
Date: Thursday November 21, 2013
·
Time: 16.00 - 18.00 hrs
·
Location: Utrecht University, Aula, University Hall (Domplein 29)
·
Chair: Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi
In
this lecture Prof. Dr. Bishnupriya Ghosh will revisit Mother Teresa as
Corporeal Aperture. The customary critique of Mother Teresa reads her image as
a compromised mass commodity, the anointed saint who habitually produces the
“third world” as her necessary gutter. While it is certainly the case that
global icons of her ilk lure consumers into commodity fetishism, isolating them
from social relations, we see these recursive images routinely deployed in
challenges to hegemonic institutions all over the world; reassembled culturally
familiar icons surface in the new negotiations over global modernity, often
making the news when they instigate outbreaks of iconophobia or iconomania.
These iconoclashes suggest there is more to the story of mass stupefaction told
in the iconoclastic critique. What better way to think beyond this promissory
skepticism than to relocate the scholarly gaze to a global region replete with
rich cultural histories of icon veneration? Mother Teresa, then, provides an
exemplary instance of a general social phenomena: the periodic outbreaks of
anger, grief, even riots, around highly visible public figures (a Lady Diana, a
Barack Obama, or an Eva Perón) circulating as icons in mass media. Looking
closely at her eruption as popular saint in Kolkata, the talk argues for a
reconstituted theory of the icon properly attentive to the mass commodity’s
sudden volatilization into a magical technology of the popular.
With a doctorate from Northwestern University, Bishnupriya Ghosh is Professor
of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she acts as chair of the department and teaches
postcolonial theory and global media studies. Much of her scholarly work
interrogates the relations between the global and the postcolonial; area studies
and transnational cultural studies; popular, mass, and elite cultures. While
publishing essays on literary, cinematic, and visual culture in several
collections and journals such as boundary 2, Journal of
Postcolonial Studies, Public Culture and Screen, in her
first two books, Ghosh focused on contemporary elite and popular cultures of
globalization. When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary
Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) addressed the dialectical relations between
emerging global markets and literatures reflexively marked as “postcolonial,”
and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011) turned to
visual popular culture as it constitutes the global. Research is underway for a
third monograph, The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization
that tracks the relations between globalization and cinematic/post-cinematic
images.
