Beating the longstanding allegations of colorblindness, the last decade has witnessed a renewed interest in antisociality and “negativity” among scholars of Afropessimism and Queer of Color Negativity. Postcolonial theory, however, has not yet engaged with the school of non-relationality and the world-negating tendencies of “negativity.” This panel will, therefore, attempt to understand the purchase of “negativity” by postcolonial theorists, especially those writing about South Asia, and explore what political and aesthetic concerns might open up by the non-relational approaches to South Asian literatures and films.

The panel starts with Ketan Jain’s presentation titled “The (W)hole of India: Non-sovereignty, Nationalism, and Negativity,” where he argues that recent queer interventions in area studies, such as those by Geeta Patel and Anjali Arondekar, foreground the incommensurability of geopolitical difference as a methodological refusal of coherence. At the same time, this refusal remains tethered to a residual desire for geopolitical legibility expressed in its return to categories of area—like “South Asia” or “India”—as graspable entities. This impasse is also evident in Ashis Nandy’s theorization of sectarian violence, where the effort to mourn the trauma of the 1947 Partition of India reinstates “British India” as a coherent arena, suturing “Hindus,” Muslims, and Sikhs into a retroactively unified field of imperial subjection. These useful rhetorical gestures unwittingly reproduce the partitioning logic of sovereignty by positing a unified collectivity prior to antagonism as the basis of a revivable nation. Taking Forster’s A Passage to India as an example of radical negativity, this paper argues that “Indian” emerges precisely through the foreclosure of these antagonisms between and within communities that render it structurally impossible, and that nationalism functions not as the resolution but as the displacement of irresolution and unfixity. The novel will demonstrate how “negativity” interrupts the fantasy of sovereign coherence.

Gautam Basu Thakur’s presentation, “Enjoyment and the Death Drive in Ritwik Ghatak’s Cinema,” examines the function and form of enjoyment, specifically, the Other’s excessive jouissance, in the cinema of the South Asian/Bengali auteur Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976). Ghatak’s movies are seen as testaments to mourning: melodramatic portrayals of alienation and separation stemming from the Partition of the subcontinent and its devastating effects on social, familial, and libidinal ties. This paper argues that Ghatak’s films, while seeming to consciously navigate loss and recover a wholesome future, repeatedly choreograph tensions between excessive jouissance and the morbid reality of irreparable loss, emphasizing the impossibility of re-establishing harmonious social relations. In Ghatak’s cinema, excessive enjoyment does not figure as a disruption of harmonious social relations (as commonly noted in many recent expositions of this Lacanian concept), but promises wholesome futures: life, home, and happiness. Yet this promise is fractured by a social reality where human lives are filled with absolute despair. As such, Ghatak’s films foreground reality on the side of death–a condition of hopeless fragmentation that cannot be healed or justified, but only endured. The paper will examine the specific cinematic forms through which this vision appears and the functions they serve within the broader context of art and politics.

Kalpana Seshadri’s presentation, “Negative Plasticity and the Death Drive: Rethinking South Asian Slum Ecologies” proposes a rethinking of the death drive in the context of South Asian slum ecologies by bringing Catherine Malabou’s account of destructive or negative plasticity into dialogue with political ecology and ethnographic narratives. Drawing on Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers alongside other ethnographic and theoretical work on informal settlements, this paper argues that the death drive, when detached from libidinal or erotic determination—as Malabou proposes in her reworking of Freud—offers a critical framework for understanding forms of life that persist within conditions of extreme precarity.

Conventional accounts of slum life often emphasize affective depletion, trauma, or what Nancy Scheper-Hughes, in the context of the Brazilian favela, describes as a socially produced indifference to violence and death. Against such accounts, this presentation proposes that the slum must be understood as a complex, open system characterized by continuous metamorphosis, where destruction and formation are not opposed but co-implicated. Death, here, offers an emergent mode of relationality that allows for the reconfiguration of collective life beyond the horizon of individualized grief. This paper argues for an understanding of the death drive not as a principle of pure negation, but as a force immanent to the unstable, non-linear, and non-governable transformations that shape life in the Global South.

Each panelist will speak for 15 minutes, leaving 30 minutes for questions, audience participation, and intervention by the respondent.