Guerlac Room, A.D. White House
ICM New Conversations Series
J. DANIEL ELAM
Fellow, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University
ABSTRACT
Now comrades,” Fanon begins his conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth, “Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world…. Come, comrades, the European game is finally over, we must look for something else.” What is to be done when political protest has proven unsuccessful? This talk considers two thinkers of anticolonial political action, Frantz Fanon and B.R. Ambedkar, to suggest “stopping and leaving” as a mode of refusal and collective exit. Though by no means unique to anticolonial thought, Ambedkar’s and Fanon’s approaches to “stopping and leaving” offer us a way to think political collectivity beyond the purview of the state. This talk examines two moments of anticolonial refusal: Fanon’s call “to endeavor to create a new man” and Ambedkar’s demand for Dalits (“untouchables”) to abandon “the Hindu fold” by conversion to Buddhism. Stopping and leaving gestures to the possibility of a collective not “bound by recognition,” but rather committed to an unknowable heteronomy.
BIO
J Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He previously taught in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, and was the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow in "Bibliomigrancy" at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work focuses on anticolonialism and anti-imperial critique from South Asia at the beginning of the twentieth-century. He is the co-editor (with Kama Maclean and Chris Moffat) of two books on South Asian revolutionary anticolonialism and has published essays in Postcolonial Studies, Interventions, BioScope, and PMLA.
This event is free and open to the public. If you need accommodations to participate in this event, please contact icm@cornell.edu as soon as possible.
