Jump to content

Priyamvada Gopal

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by LumumbaX (talk | contribs) at 10:04, 4 October 2022 (removed trivial disputes, undue weight in article). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Priyamvada Gopal
Gopal in 2019
Born1968 (age 55–56)
TitleProfessor of Postcolonial Studies
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of Delhi
Jawaharlal Nehru University
Cornell University
ThesisMidnight's labors: Gender, nation and narratives of social transformation in transitional India, 1932–1954 (2000)
Doctoral advisorBiodun Jeyifo[1]
Academic work
InstitutionsUniversity of Cambridge
Churchill College

Priyamvada Gopal (born 1968)[2] is an Indian-born academic, writer and public intellectual who is Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. Her primary teaching and research interests are in colonial and postcolonial studies, South Asian literature, critical race studies, and the politics and cultures of empire and globalisation.[3] She has written three books engaging these subjects: Literary Radicalism in India (2005), The Indian English Novel (2009) and Insurgent Empire (2019). Her work on Indian writing in English and expertise in colonial and postcolonial literature are recognised at universities worldwide.[4] Her third book, Insurgent Empire, was shortlisted for the 2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.[5][6]

Gopal's work has also appeared in several newspapers and online publications, and she has contributed occasionally to radio and television programmes in Britain and elsewhere. She is also known for her prominent use of social media.[3][7] Her remarks about race and empire have gained media attention and disagreement.[8][9][10][11][12] In 2021, she was named one of the world's top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine.[13]

Biography

Early life

Gopal was born in Delhi, India. The daughter of an Indian diplomat, she spent her childhood in India, Sri Lanka and Bhutan, and attended an international high school in Vienna, where her father served as a diplomat in the mid-1980s.[14][15] She is from a Brahmin family but is a vocal critic of the caste system.[16][17][18][19]

Education and career

Gopal received a BA in English from the University of Delhi in 1989 and an MA in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 1991. After finishing her studies in India, she moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies in English. She received an MA in English from Purdue University in 1993 and Cornell University in 1996. She eventually gravitated toward postcolonial studies, completing a PhD in colonial and postcolonial literature at Cornell University in 2000.[3][20][21]

She began her teaching career as a Graduate Instructor in the Department of English at Cornell University in 1995. She joined Connecticut College in 1999 as an Assistant Professor of English and remained there until 2000. She moved to the University of Cambridge in 2001, where she is Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of English and a Teaching Fellow at Churchill College.[3][20][22] She supervises and teaches in the areas of literary criticism, modern tragedy, 19th-century and modern British literature, and postcolonial and related literatures. Her primary interests are in colonial and postcolonial literatures, with related interests in British and American literatures, the novel, translation, gender and feminism, Marxism and critical theory, and the politics and cultures of empire and globalisation. From 2006 to 2010, she was Dean of Churchill College.[3][20]

Work

As a literary critic, Gopal explores a range of issues and ideas, with a focus on race, empire, and decolonisation.

Empire

Gopal has written extensively about the impact of empire on contemporary culture in Britain and examined its broader social and cultural effects in South Asia and other former colonial societies.[23][24][25]

In her book Insurgent Empire, Gopal examines traditions of dissent on the question of empire and shows how rebellions and resistance in the colonies influenced British critics of empire in a process she calls "reverse tutelage".[26] She argues that ideas of freedom, justice, and common humanity had themselves taken shape in the struggle against imperialism.[27]

Gopal has also written about the historical amnesia surrounding empire and called for a more honest account of how Britain came to be what it is today. She argues that developing a demanding relationship to history is essential to understanding the formative and shaping nature of the imperial project on British life.[28][29]

BBC Radio 4: Start the Week

In 2006, Gopal took part in a debate on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week.[30] In the segment, historian Niall Ferguson argued that the British Empire was, by and large, a benevolent and virtuous enterprise. Gopal challenged Ferguson's account, questioning his assertions about the greatness of empire.[31] The programme became a matter of controversy. That evening, the BBC invited another Indian woman onto their programme, who said that not all young Indians agreed with Gopal. Gopal later accused the BBC of pushing an agenda and playing off "natives" against each other.[32] Gopal said that it was this experience that galvanized her to write and think more publicly about empire.[33]

Decolonisation

For Gopal, decolonisation is about a process of thinking about our intellectual, personal and political formation in a historical frame.[34] In her essay "On Decolonisation and the University", she writes that decolonisation "commits to recognising the centrality of colonialism in shaping the globe as we experience it today; to assessing its consequences for communities and cultures; to interrogating and dismantling harmful mythologies and falsehoods on which the colonial project relied as well as those that underpin its afterlife today; and to repairing the great gaps in our knowledge and understanding that have emerged consequently."[35]

In relation to cultural and intellectual work, she argues that decolonisation poses different kinds of questions in different contexts about our relationship to colonialism.[35] She argues that decolonisation in the European context involves Europe 'reckoning with its colonial self-constitution and thinking about the legacies and afterlives of colonialism both "within" and "without" its complicated and shifting borders.' She draws on Ngũgĩ and Fanon to argue that Europe's material, cultural and intellectual riches also cannot be separated from its encounters with the Global South.[35]

Gopal contends that decolonisation must begin with an unflinchingly truthful engagement with empire and colonialism, and a sustained study of how Europe's forays into the world made 'Europe'.[35]

She has also been a long-standing advocate for the 'decolonisation' of Cambridge's English curriculum. In June 2017, a group of Cambridge students had called for the university to include more black and ethnic minority writers in its English literature curriculum, an initiative strongly supported by Gopal.[36] She argues that decolonisation in the curriculum context is about having access to information and narratives, which reframe our understanding of the multiple lineages and sources of knowledge.[37]

Race

Gopal has written and commented extensively on the subject of race and how it operates in contemporary society. She argues that whiteness is primarily a cultural category, not a biological one, and is useful for explaining how western societies work in terms of how society is structured, and how such structures determine power relations between dominant and non-dominant groups.[38][39]

In the context of racial discrimination in the United Kingdom, Gopal has discussed white fragility, suggesting that a "way of deflecting engagement with race is to personalise matters".[40] In October 2019, Gopal criticised the Equality and Human Rights Commission report "Tackling racial harassment: Universities challenged" for its language and not addressing the systemic disadvantages faced by black and minority ethnic students or the ways whiteness dominates power structures and pedagogy.[41][42]

"White lives don't matter. As white lives" tweet

On 23 June 2020, Gopal tweeted "White lives don't matter. As white lives" and "Abolish whiteness", in response to a banner flown over a Premier League football stadium that read "White lives matter Burnley". She received abusive messages, including death threats, following her tweet.[43][44] Gopal told the media that her comments were opposing the concept of whiteness – the presumption of white superiority – and challenging the racial basis for lives mattering, adding that it wasn't whiteness that gave lives their dignity, nor should it be the criteria for lives mattering.[45] Gopal stood by her tweets asserting that her comments were "very clearly speaking to a structure and ideology, not about people".[46]

The following day, the University of Cambridge tweeted a blanket defence of its academics' right to free speech, without explicitly referencing her case. A statement released by the university read: "The University defends the right of its academics to express their own lawful opinions which others might find controversial and deplores in the strongest terms abuse and personal attacks. These attacks are totally unacceptable and must cease".[47]

In November 2020, the Daily Mail paid £25,000 in damages to Gopal after the paper falsely alleged that she was attempting to incite a race war and that she supports and endorses the subjugation and persecution of white people.[48] The allegations, made by Amanda Platell in a column following the "White lives" tweet, were based on an inflammatory quote from a fake Twitter account, which Platell's column falsely attributed to Gopal.[48] The column had also partially quoted Gopal's "White lives" tweet as saying 'White lives don't matter.', but chose to omit the remainder of the quote, which went on to state "As White Lives", distorting its context and meaning.[48] In addition to paying damages, the newspaper also published full apologies in the Daily Mail and agreed to pay Gopal's legal costs.[48]

Bibliography

Books

  • Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (Routledge, 2005)[49]
  • The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (Oxford University Press, 2009)[50]
  • Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso, 2019)[27]

Articles

  • "Of Victims and Vigilantes: The "Bandit Queen" Controversy". Thamyris Amsterdam. vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 73-102 (1997)[51]
  • "'Curious Ironies': Matter and Meaning in Bhabhani Bhattacharya's Novel of the 1943 Bengal Famine". ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 61-88 (2001)[52]
  • "Sex, space and modernity in the work of Rashid Jahan, "Angareywali"". Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies. pp. 150-166 (2002)[53]
  • "Reading subaltern history". The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. pp. 139-161 (2004)[54]
  • "The'Moral Empire': Africa, globalisation and the politics of conscience". New Formations. issue 59, pp. 81-98 (2006)[55]
  • "Concerning Maoism: Fanon, Revolutionary Violence, and Postcolonial India". South Atlantic Quarterly. vol. 112, no. 1, pp. 115-128 (2013)[56]
  • "Speaking with Difficulty: Feminism and Antiracism in Britain after 9/11". Feminist Studies. vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 98-118 (2013)[57]
  • "Redressing anti-imperial amnesia". Race & Class. vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 18-30 (2016)[58]
  • "Of Capitalism and Critique: 'Af-Pak' Fiction in the Wake of 9/11". South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations. pp. 21–36 (2016)[59]
  • "On Decolonisation and the University". Textual Practice. vol. 35, no. 6, pp. 873-899 (2021)[60]

References

  1. ^ "Literature Tree - Priyamvada Gopal". academictree.org. Retrieved 8 April 2021.
  2. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada 1968-, WorldCat, retrieved 25 June 2020
  3. ^ a b c d e "Professor Priyamvada Gopal, University of Cambridge" (staff profile). Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. n.d. Retrieved 28 June 2020.
  4. ^ Dasgupta, Piyasree (26 June 2018). "How This Indian-Origin Professor Is Calling Out Cambridge University's 'Racism'". HuffPost.
  5. ^ Taylor, Miles (11 July 2019). "Insurgent Empire by Priyamvada Gopal review – a superb study of anticolonial resistance". The Guardian.
  6. ^ The British Academy. "2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize". The British Academy.
  7. ^ Lodhia, Devarshi (12 April 2018). "Cambridge lecturer condemns Daily Mail over 'racist and sexist hatchet job'". Varsity.
  8. ^ Rawlinson, Kevin (25 June 2020). "'Abolish whiteness' academic calls for Cambridge support". The Guardian.
  9. ^ Race review chief Tony Sewell compared to Joseph Goebbels in social media abuse The Times 2-Apr-2021
  10. ^ Woolcock, Nicola (11 February 2021). "Cambridge college named after Winston Churchill debates his 'backward' views on race". The Times.
  11. ^ Oppenheim, Maya (20 June 2018). "Cambridge academic says she will not work for university after accusing porters of racist abuse". The Independent.
  12. ^ Norris, Sian (20 April 2021). "'Most British Institutions Pander to the Mail's Blackmailing & Racism'". Byline Times.
  13. ^ "The world's top 50 thinkers 2021". Prospect. 13 July 2021. Retrieved 17 February 2022.
  14. ^ Manral, Kiran (7 November 2019). "Xenophobia Is Not Exclusively A Western Practice: Dr Priyamvada Gopal". SheThePeople.
  15. ^ Ross, Elliot (5 February 2020). "First rule of fight club: power concedes nothing without a struggle". The Correspondent.
  16. ^ Banerjee, Chandrima (13 July 2020). "'Many Indian trolls wrote me hate mails defending white supremacists'". The Times Of India.
  17. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (18 February 2018). "Response to Mary Beard". Medium. Retrieved 12 April 2021.
  18. ^ Pivhal, Navin (16 November 2019). "Decoding how rebellious colonies changed: British attitudes to empire". The Hans India.
  19. ^ Guéron-Gabrielle, Juliette (8 September 2020). "Professor Gopal: "The humanities gave me scope for youthful rebellion"". Varsity.
  20. ^ a b c "Professor Priyamvada Gopal, Churchill College" (staff profile). Churchill College, University of Cambridge. n.d. Retrieved 29 July 2022.
  21. ^ Rahimi, Rosa (27 July 2020). "Professor Priyamvada Gopal: "There is such a thing as truth, and we are accountable to truth."". The Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs.
  22. ^ "Reports - Cambridge University Reporter 6586". www.admin.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 11 January 2021.
  23. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (28 June 2006). "The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale". The Guardian.
  24. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (2 April 2007). "It is contradictory to condemn slavery and yet celebrate the empire". The Guardian.
  25. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (6 July 2019). "Britain's story of empire is based on myth. We need to know the truth". The Guardian.
  26. ^ Joseph, Tony (30 May 2020). "'Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent' review: Striking back at the Empire". The Hindu.
  27. ^ a b Gopal, Priyamvada (14 June 2019). Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent. Verso. p. 624. ISBN 9781784784126.
  28. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (31 July 2012). "Mau Mau verdict: Britain must undo its imperial amnesia". The Guardian.
  29. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (18 January 2016). "Redressing anti-imperial amnesia". SAGE Journals. Vol. 57, no. 3. pp. 18–30. doi:10.1177/0306396815608127.
  30. ^ BBC Radio 4, Start the Week (12 June 2006). "Start the Week: The Legacy of Empire". BBC Radio 4.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  31. ^ Andrew Marr (12 June 2006). "The Legacy of Empire". BBC Radio 4: Start the Week (Podcast). BBC. Archived from the original on 14 June 2006.
  32. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (13 June 2006). "Open Letter to Andrew Marr, Presenter, Start the Week on Radio 4, the BBC". Lenin's Tomb.
  33. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (14 June 2019). Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent - Excerpt. Verso. p. 624. ISBN 9781784784126.
  34. ^ Tristan Boyle (2019). "Modern Myth: Insurgent Empire and the Lost Voices in Colonialism with Dr. Priyamvada Gopal". The Archaeology Podcast Network (Podcast). published by Tristan Boyle.
  35. ^ a b c d Gopal, Priyamvada (28 May 2021). "On Decolonisation and the University". Textual Practice. 35 (6): 873–899. doi:10.1080/0950236X.2021.1929561.
  36. ^ Kennedy, Maev (26 October 2017). "Cambridge academics seek to 'decolonise' English syllabus". The Guardian.
  37. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (28 October 2017). "Yes, we must decolonise: our teaching has to go beyond elite white men". The Guardian.
  38. ^ Myriam Francois (2019). "The Whiteness of History with Priyamvada Gopal". We Need to Talk about Whiteness (Podcast). published by Myriam Francois.
  39. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (4 July 2020). "We can't talk about racism without understanding whiteness". The Guardian.
  40. ^ "If we can't call racism by its name, diversity will remain a meaningless buzzword". The Guardian. 8 October 2019.
  41. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada; Rollock, Nicola (24 October 2019). "'Monolithically white places': academics on racism in universities". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 4 November 2019.
  42. ^ "Tackling racial harassment: universities challenged | Equality and Human Rights Commission". www.equalityhumanrights.com. Retrieved 4 November 2019.
  43. ^ Turner, Ben (25 June 2020). "Death threats sent to Cambridge University professor after 'white lives don't matter' tweet". Cambridgeshire Live.
  44. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (16 July 2020). "The Dossier of White-Hot Hatred". Medium.
  45. ^ Rawlinson, Kevin (25 June 2020). "'Abolish whiteness' academic calls for Cambridge support". The Guardian.
  46. ^ Huskisson, Sophie (25 June 2020). "Priyamvada Gopal promoted to Professorship, as online abuse continues". Varsity.
  47. ^ Gamp, Joe (25 June 2020). "Cambridge University defends professor who tweeted 'abolish whiteness'". Yahoo! News.
  48. ^ a b c d Waterson, Jim (13 November 2013). "Daily Mail pays £25,000 to professor it falsely accused of inciting race war". The Guardian. Retrieved 13 November 2020.
  49. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (9 March 2005). Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence. Routledge. p. 192. ISBN 9780415655453.
  50. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (29 January 2009). The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 232. ISBN 9780199544370.
  51. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (1997). "Of Victims and Vigilantes: The "Bandit Queen" Controversy". Thamyris Amsterdam. 4 (1). Najade Press: 73–102.
  52. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (2001). "'Curious Ironies': Matter and Meaning in Bhabhani Bhattacharya's Novel of the 1943 Bengal Famine". ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. 32 (3): 61–88.
  53. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (2002). "Sex, space and modernity in the work of Rashid Jahan, "Angareywali"". Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies. Cambridge University Press: 150–166. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511483158.008. ISBN 9780521813679.
  54. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (2004). "Reading subaltern history". The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge University Press: 139–161. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521826942.008. ISBN 9780521534185.
  55. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (2006). "The'Moral Empire': Africa, globalisation and the politics of conscience". New Formations (59). Lawrence & Wishart Ltd.: 81–98.
  56. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (2013). "Concerning Maoism: Fanon, Revolutionary Violence, and Postcolonial India". South Atlantic Quarterly. 112 (1). Duke University Press: 115–128. doi:10.1215/00382876-1891278.
  57. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (2013). "Speaking with Difficulty: Feminism and Antiracism in Britain after 9/11". Feminist Studies. 39 (1). Feminist Studies, Inc.: 98–118. doi:10.1353/fem.2013.0027. S2CID 245658599.
  58. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (2016). "Redressing anti-imperial amnesia". Race & Class. 57 (3). SAGE Publications: 18–30. doi:10.1177/0306396815608127. S2CID 146938315.
  59. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (2016). "Of Capitalism and Critique: 'Af-Pak' Fiction in the Wake of 9/11". South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations. Palgrave MacMillan: 21–36. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-40354-4_2. ISBN 978-1-137-40353-7.
  60. ^ Gopal, Priyamvada (2021). "On Decolonisation and the University". Textual Practice. 35 (6). Routledge: 873–899. doi:10.1080/0950236X.2021.1929561. S2CID 235636408.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Priyamvada_Gopal&oldid=1114012267"