"The Spatial Politics of Marginality" by Swati Chattopadhyay

• Event Date: Tuesday, March 3, 2015
• Time: 4:30 pm–6:00 pm (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Performance

How does one recuperate from the archive, spaces and people who have been marginalized, dominated as it is by the discourse of the elite and powerful? How do we access the everyday spaces of women and servants who have left only small footprints in the historical archive? How do we recognize practices that challenge the dominant view of the state? These processes often involve spaces that may not be small in extent but remain peripheral in disposition, importance, and imagination and are marked by the difficulty of representation. Utilizing examples from domestic spaces of British colonial India and urban sites in postcolonial India, I will argue for a geography of small spaces that might help us understand the representational logic of marginality. Recognition of such a geography, I will suggest, must entail a radical understanding of materiality.

This Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) event is co-sponsored by the Spurlock Museum.