Samanwita Sen

samanwita sen
DPhil Candidate
St Antony's College

Thesis title: Writing "Inhumanity" in Indigenous Literature

Supervisor: Pablo Mukherjee

 

Research Interests: World Literatures; Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures; Indigenous Literature; Literature and Law; Post-Modernism; Transnationalism

 

Doctoral Research: Broadly speaking, I propose to examine how indigenous writers reclaim and reanimate categories of the “inhuman,” imbuing it with a newly expanded valence of resistance against colonial erasure. Indigenous “inhumanity” was enshrined within the very fabric of the law: these communities were systematically subordinated to colonial charters that codified their bodies as aberrant and transgressive. These strategies of dehumanisation served to expel indigenous lives from the full purview of personhood, thereby upholding the racially pure, colonial archetype as the sole, rights-bearing individual before the law: rational, inviolable, and the locus of sovereign power. 

 

As my research currently stands, I argue writers such as Tommy Orange and Terese Marie Mailhot radically rescript the “inhuman” to signify a more protean conception of personhood that, in its plural subjectivities, rejects the law’s effacing gestures. For Orange and Mailhot, to be “inhuman” is to profess affiliation with a transmigratory realm that transcends the coercive, exclusionary bounds of the human. In keeping with Native American communities’ deep allegiance to the supernatural, the “inhuman” encompassed a kaleidoscopic interrelation with the natural and spiritual world beyond the human, including the lineages lost to massacre and lineages to come. I examine how the "inhuman" becomes a core site of resistance and a conduit through which lives lost to massacre can be preserved through memorial transmission.

 

My research is fully funded by the Oxford-Hong Kong Jockey Club Graduate Scholarship.

 

Conferences and Talks:

  • “The Ironies of Nationhood”: The Chauvinist and Liberatory Dimensions of the Nation, London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, “International Conference on Postcolonial Studies: Trajectories and Transitions of (Post)-Colonialism", 2024
     
  • “The Ironies of Nationhood”: The Chauvinist and Liberatory Dimensions of the Nation, CEEISA-ISA International Conference 2024 (Croatia), “Knowing the Global-Local: Imagining Pasts, Debating Futures", 2024
     
  • “The Ironies of Nationhood”: The Chauvinist and Liberatory Dimensions of the Nation, Loughborough University Network (LUNN) “Nations and Nationalisms 2.0: Theories, Practices, and Methods, International Postgraduate Conference", 2024
     
  • “Can the present save the past? Can the living save the dead?” (Han TWR): The Body as Political Vessel and Memorial Conduit in the Works of Han Kang, London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, “Violence and Society, International Conference”, 2024
     
  • “The Ironies of Nationhood”: The Chauvinist and Liberatory Dimensions of the Nation, Ireland India Institute, Dublin City University “Seventh Annual South Asia Conference”, 2024
     
  • “The Ironies of Nationhood”: The Chauvinist and Liberatory Dimensions of the Nation, New Voices in Postcolonial Literature Bimonthly Seminar Series, 2023