Myth/History/Irreverence: Flaneurs and Whores of Our Time
As part of a longer discovery and reading of Walter Benjamin's work, Atreyee Majumder constructs an argument that the turgid notions of the new, the contemporary and the important are endless repetitions of nothing-new. Atreyee will give a lecture on this on 8 January 2011 at the Centre for Internet and Society.
Many epochs, many histories seem to collide in a transient yet euphoric sensation of the ‘new’, immediately turning into ash-like heap of nothing-new. This understanding of the historic contemporary as a shuffle of old cards, yields new lenses through which to interpret the turgidity of the 'new' and the 'novel' in our times — technologies, crises (climate change, political upheaval, etc.), Facebook. She revisits the notion of history as scaffolding — especially, through the Benjaminian point of view of the Flaneur and the Whore, albeit the ones of our time.
Atreyee Majumder
Atreyee graduated from the National Law School of India University in 2006 and is a PhD student of Socio-cultural Anthropology at the Yale University, with keen interests in political anthropology, spatiality, historicity, the interaction of many planes of history which constitute the historical residue of the contemporary. She is doing a dissertation research on the making of political subjects on the peri-urban terrain in Howrah, West Bengal, in the shadows of socialisms, and everyday dialog with metropolitan norms of civicness from neighbouring Kolkata. She has worked as an activist and researcher in the fields of law, environment and development in Delhi.
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Event details
When
from 12:30 PM to 02:00 PM
