Sambo: A (Post)Colonial (Mis)Education
11.10.2016 | 5:00 – 7:00 PM | Maude Fife Room, Hearst Annex D-37, UC Berkeley
with Abdul R. JanMohamed, English
Presided and Moderated by: Professor Paola Bacchetta, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies; Co-chair, Project on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights, Center for Race & Gender, UC Berkeley
Speaker Introduced by: Angana Chatterji, Visiting Research Anthropologist and Co-chair, Project on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights, Center for Race and Gender, UC Berkeley
How does the (Post)Colonial world configure its subjects? Having examined this question in the past from scholarly, critical and analytic viewpoints, Abdul R. JanMohamed now turns to the more subjective, autobiographical experiences that have triggered, conditioned and fueled his distinguished body of scholarly/critical accounts on the subject. This presentation will focus on two singular occurrences from JanMohamed’s childhood: first, being interpellated in a British boarding school as “Sambo,” a comic and pathetic creature who was nevertheless deemed capable of corrupting the morals of innocent English schoolboys; second, being configured as a death-bound-subject, one commanded to absolute silence via the deployment of violence, which was in turn invariably supplemented by the threat of death. The first correlates with Manichean Aesthetics (1983) and the second with The Death-Bound-Subject (2005).
Hosted by the Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Project, Center for Race and Gender. Co-sponsored by the Center for British Studies, Department of English, Department of Gender and Women's Studies, Institute for the Study of South Asia, Townsend Center for the Humanities, and CRG's Research Working Group - Muslim Identities and Cultures.