Professor Sarkar, on the seventieth anniversary of the independence/partition of 1947, will return to the ever-contested borders of South Asia to speculate on the region’s fissured futures, and to think about the constitutive relation between borders and futurities. His lecture will draw on two instances of life and creativity in the borderlands of India: the resolute aspirations and precarious agencies wrought by frontier communities in the face of insurmountable adversities.
BHASKAR SARKAR Associate Professor of Film and Media, UC Santa Barbara, is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press, 2009) and a wide range of articles published in collections and journals. He is also the co-editor of Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge, 2009), Asian Video Cultures (forthcoming, 2017), The Routledge Handbook of Media and Risk (forthcoming, 2018) and two journal special issues, “The Subaltern and the Popular,” Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2005) and “Indian Documentary Studies,” BioScope (2012). He is currently working on two monographs--on the plasticity of contemporary cultural nationalisms, and on media piracy.