Environmental Humanities Seminar with Sreyashi Ray

Airborne Hospitality: Visualizing Avian Companionship in a Breathless City

Speaker: Sreyashi Ray, 2024-25 MHC Postdoctoral Fellow

Respondent: Karen Thornber

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Sreyashi Ray is a literary and cultural theorist whose areas of expertise include environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, and South Asian studies. She received her Ph.D. in Asian Literatures, Cultures, and Media with a minor in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota. Her current book project, Postcolonial Zoopolitics, examines the material, symbolic, and affective dimensions of human-animal relations in twentieth and twenty-first century vernacular and Anglophone literature, cinema, and mixed-media artwork focused on the Indian subcontinent. She analyzes how postcolonial cultural narratives experiment with thematic and stylistic conventions to reconceptualize the discourses of species, race, class, religion, sexuality, hospitality, and labor in modern India. Focusing on how the polyvalence of animals is represented through productive exchanges between their metaphorical and metonymic configurations in the contexts of agrarian economy, urbanization, wildlife conservation, and atmospheric toxicity, her work critiques both uncritical consolidation and outright repudiation of interspecies hierarchies. She argues that South Asian literary and cinematic works interrogate zoopolitics or the enmeshment of political sovereignty with species-oriented discourses through narrative strategies and visual techniques that innovatively redefine animal subjectivities and interspecies communications. Sreyashi’s research has been published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Humanimalia, and Edge Effects.

Karen Thornber is Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University. Professor Thornber is a cultural historian and scholar of Asian literature and media working primarily in the fields of environmental humanities; medical and health humanities; gender justice, environmental justice, climate justice, and other forms of justice; and transculturation (e.g., translation studies, world literature, comparative literature).

Registration is required for this event.

About the Series

The Mahindra Humanities Center presents an Environmental Humanities seminar series with our 2024-25 postdoctoral fellows.