Tithi Bhattacharya - Uncanny Histories: Ghosts, Fear, and Reason in Colonial Bengal

Tithi Bhattacharya's colloquium talk catalogues new social rituals and literary forms which instituted a new discourse about ghosts in colonial Bengal and explores the ways in which the new ghosts become dominant over the old. She tries to understand the historical outcomes of death and death rituals becoming concerns for colonial governability.

Tithi Bhattacharya is a professor of South Asian History at Purdue University. She is the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2005) and the editor of the now classic study, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017). Her coauthored book includes the popular Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019) which has been translated in over 30 languages. Her new book, Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal, has just been published from Duke University Press. She writes extensively on colonialism, Marxist theory, gender, and the politics of Islamophobia.