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The Institute thus explores the complex interface between the history and the politics of knowledge formation through lifeworlds of languages, She describes the structure of ICLS as unique and distinctive among the Humanities Institutes and Centers in its founding aims: to work across the humanities and social sciences disciplines, subjecting the discipline of comparative literature– with its Eurocentric origins and focus on national literatures– to scrutiny and social critique.

On the Institute of Comparative Literature and SocietyĪnupama Rao is the Director of the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society, and its “first director to be drawn from a social science discipline”. In discussing pedagogical approaches, Rao highlights the need to center interdisciplinarity and international perspective, and notes that she believes in getting her students to “think in more global and comparative ways in all of my courses,” so that they can understand how they are implicated in global contexts and structures of power. For this, caste offers a powerful global rubric for understanding the dialectic of identity and difference, equality and exclusion.

This has led to her focus on how ideas and practices of equality and freedom have developed through efforts to name and analyze structures of historic discrimination while developing new practices of democratic life and mutuality. Rao’s work on questions concerning the history of caste and on anticaste thinking has led to her interest in “the question of stigma and subalternity,’ in how groups with “historical experience of social exclusion and deep historical discrimination lay claim to forms of thought and orders of imagination, and engage in practices of remaking selfhood and personhood.” Rao notes that she is particularly fascinated by our ideas about, and commitments to equality though we are surrounded by practices of hierarchy, domination, violence, and exploitation in our daily life. Anupama Rao describes how her training as a historical anthropologist of South Asia has influenced her research and methodological approaches, which work across imaginative, textual and the discursive, and sociological registers.