The Council on African Studies Lecture Series presents
Madhumita Lahiri, Associate Professor, English and Film Departments, University of Michigan:
“South Africa Welcomes You: Fiction, Migration, and the Local Anglophone.”
Madhumita Lahiri is associate professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research explores the intersections of language politics, print culture, and community formation across the interlinked cultural spheres of twentieth- and twenty-first century South Asia, southern Africa, and the United States. She is the author of Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone (Northwestern, 2020), which demonstrates how the coining of new words can reshape geographies and collectivities towards revolutionary political ends. A new book project, a portion of which has been published in the journal Novel in 2022, argues that there has been a particularly domesticating turn in discourses of race and racism in the twenty-first century, with devastating consequences for those whose racial injury has particularly xenophobic contours. A graduate of Yale College (2004), she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) from 2010-2011.