University of Virginia, College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Poulomi Saha, "Dropped Stitches: Fabrics of Life & the Gendered Production of Postcolonial Bangladesh"

November 3, 2017

Poulomi Saha is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses in postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality theory, and ethnic American literature.

 

Her research and teaching agenda spans eastward and forward from the late 19th century decline of British colonial rule in the Indian Ocean through to the Pacific and the rise of American global power and domestic race relations in the 20th century. Professor Saha is interested in developing an expansive view of empire and of what constitutes Anglophone literature, routed not primarily through Great Britain and Western Europe but rather through circuits of affiliation and encounter between Asia and the Americas.

 

She is currently completing her first monograph, An Empire of Touch: Feminine Political Labor & The Fabrication of East Bengal, 1905-2015, which turns attention to East Bengal, the historical antecedent of Bangladesh, today an international exemplar of development driven by gender-targeted foreign aid. An Empire of Touch recounts a new narrative of female political labor under empire, spanning from anticolonial nationalism to neoliberal globalization, through text and textile. It follows the historical traces of how women have claimed their labor, making what has been customarily seen as “merely” intimate and domestic into appreciable political acts.

 

Her work has been published in differences and The Journal of Modern Literature.

Homer Statue
Wilson 142
3:00 pm - 5:00 pm