Dr Bhakti Shringarpure
IASH-SSPS Research Fellow, August - November 2022
Home Institution: University of Connecticut
Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer and editor who has been working at the intersection of academia and public humanities for the past ten years. Her work engages questions of decolonization, race, gender and violence through a focus on literary and cultural production from the Global South and their circuits of dissemination.
Bhakti grew up in Mumbai, India and received a BA in Languages and Literature at Bard College, New York and a PhD in Comparative Literature at the City University of New York. She is currently Associate Professor jointly appointed in English and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of Connecticut. In November 2011, she co-founded the online magazine, Warscapes, in order to create an alternative space for writing, reportage, reviews and art that is often kept out of mainstream media circulation. Warscapes was awarded grants by the Open Society Foundation and the Flora Foundation, and has recently transitioned into the Radical Books Collective under Bhakti's leadership. The Radical Books Collective organizes virtual book clubs as a response to the need for a progressive, alternative and non-commercial approach to books and publishing. Readers are urged to read deeply, slowly, collectively in a safe and inclusive online environment.
Bhakti is the author Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (Routledge, 2019) Her edited works include Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (Africa World Press), Imagine Africa (Archipelago Books), Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (UpSet Press) and the forthcoming Insurgent Feminisms: Women Write War also with UpSet Press. She is the co-translator of Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop's novel Kaveena (Indiana University Press). She was the recipient of the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award in 2019 to teach and conduct research in Kenya.
She is currently the editor of a short books series called Decolonize That! Handbooks for the Revolutionary Overthrow of Embedded Colonial Ideas which is being published by OR Books in New York. Her co-produced section for the Los Angeles Review of Books titled Decolonize | Defund | Abolish engages scholars, artists, and activists in dialogues about structures of colonialism persisting in the world today, and about creative and speculative practices of freedom in response to these structures. She has written for Africa is a Country, New Frame, Scroll, Brittle Paper, LitHub and the Guardian, UK.
Project Title: Stories and Saviors: On Literary Humanitarianism
My IASH project Stories and Saviors: On Literary Humanitarianism will expand upon my critical engagement with humanitarianism through a focus on saviorist proclivities in literary, cultural and storytelling initiatives. Today, we see a proliferation of stories of single individuals perceived as victims in need of humanitarian support. These broadly tend to include women in the Global South, children, migrants and refugees, and survivors of persecution based on gender, sexuality, race and religion, among others. Such stories disseminate in various ways: on websites, newsletters and funding drives of humanitarian and rights advocacy organizations, as memoirs and novels, and as full-fledged initiatives that promote stories as a force for change. I use the term “literary humanitarianism” since these stories rely specifically on literary elements of craft such as narrative, setting the scene, plot and exposition in order to generate empathy and activate discourses of social change. Literary humanitarianism becomes one node among many others that attempts to imbue human subjects with dignity, alleviate suffering and respond to emergency and non-emergency crises. I argue that such practices today extend colonial, civilizing mission ideologies and simultaneously gives rise to an extractive ecology that relies upon victim stories for funding and sustenance of humanitarian initiatives.