Tell us about your stay in Bangladesh. What’s your plan?
I am here in Dhaka on my sabbatical leave. And I will be here for about nine months. Of course, I have plans to visit Bangladesh every summer to continue to do the kind of politically engaged theoretical and critical work that actually calls for my physical presence here. I’m glad I’ve recently joined the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) as a scholar-in-residence. I’ll be primarily teaching English and Humanities at ULAB, with a focus on interdisciplinary readings of literary and cultural productions from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Also, I’ll be working on my book-in-progress tentatively titled Insurrectionary Interdisciplinarity. Broadly speaking, my book advances a sustained political critique of Western, mainstream interdisciplinary studies, while proposing an alternative model of interdisciplinarity in the interest of emancipatory politics and radical social transformation. I’m glad the Columbia University Press Book Series called “Insurrections”?the editors of which include Slavoj Zizek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, and Jeffrey Robbins?has shown an active interest in and supported my project.
Further, I’ll be giving public lectures on such topics as the philosophy and politics of language; the politics and political economy of interdisciplinarity; Joyce, Borges, and Arabic literature; Gramsci and Fanon; and Mao, Mallarmé, and Mathematics in the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s work, among other topics, during my nine-month stay in Bangladesh. Indeed, these topics have long interested me. Well, as you can see, my three passions are politics, poetry, and philosophy. Another three: Marx, music, and mathematics. Damn, they ‘alliterate!’
What do you think of the English literary scenario in Bangladesh?
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