Seminar: Foucault and Postcolonial Governmentalities in South Asia
This seminar hinges on South Asian governmentalities (Legg and Heath, 2018), as experienced in postcolonial South Asian nation states. They were erstwhile colonies, liberated through intense anti-colonial struggles against the British, a move that involved totalizing discourses of autonomy and nation-making. The newly born nations, supposed to be democratic guardian states, however, adopted the sovereign logic of governmentality and gradually most postcolonial nation states in South Asia, engulfed in internecine conflicts, diluted its nourishing roles to legitimize structural authoritarianism. They often demonstrate autocratic tendencies, evolving into absolutist state-machines, adopting culturalist disciplinary technologies to govern its citizens. There are occasional signs of carceral despotism, liquidating norm-deviant voices, adopting bio-political control in the name of national integration, identity and securitization. All these governmentality-oriented highhandedness demand a fresh Foucauldian analysis of normative categories such as power, civil society, territoriality, identity, state control, security, etc in the South Asian contexts. Postcolonial scholars, so far, have primarily looked into the perspectival reservoir of indigenous thinkers (quite understandably and legitimately so) but a larger Foucauldian critical hermeneutics can offer fresh analytical tools to understand the postcolonial biopolitical predicament. This proposed Kolkata chapter of the World Foucault Congress will look into the postcolonial governmentality question through the Foucauldian lens.




