End Date :
CSDS, Seminar Room. Times are IST (India Standard Time)
Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI)
ICLS; Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape (South Africa); Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (Delhi); Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Study, Tsinghua University (Beijing)
Please note that the Global Institute “Global Racisms” events are closed to the public.
Drawing on her recent book, Violence of Democracy: Interparty Conflict in South India, in this presentation, Ruchi Chaturvedi situates interparty violence in Kerala in the local, national, and global history of representative democracy. She posits aggressive competition as a modality central to the life of many democracies in the postcolonial and Euro-American worlds. Such competition has frequently fostered majoritarian violence, religious and ethnic conflagrations, racial supremacism, and xenophobia. At the same time, political groups who perpetuate this violence have won impressive electoral victories. Against this backdrop, Chaturvedi juxtaposes ethnographic insights on political violence in North Kerala with historically informed critiques of representative democracy that both scholars of the global south and north have offered.
Drawing on her research and these critiques, Chaturvedi unpacks how postcolonial democracies have cultivated and rewarded a politics of similitude and violent hegemonic masculinities. Other topics she analyses are the paradigms of responsibility, which undergird the modern criminal justice system, and that have further facilitated exclusionary politics in India and elsewhere. The task of obtaining more equal, just, and less violent democracies, she suggests, is premised on such an interrogation.
Ruchi Chaturvedi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research focuses on cultures of democracy, popular politics and political violence in South Asia and South Africa. She is the author of Violence of Democracy: Interparty Conflict in South India (Duke University Press, Orient Blackswan, 2023) and co-editor of Epistemic Justice and the Postcolonial University (Wits University Press, 2023).
