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DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260717T183000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Kolkata:20260717T200000
DTSTAMP:20260708T214902
CREATED:20260708T103717Z
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UID:91596-1784313000-1784318400@bangaloreinternationalcentre.org
SUMMARY:The Worlds of Colonial Medicine
DESCRIPTION:In much literary scholarship\, colonial medicine has been characterized as a site of racialized knowledge production\, cultural denigration and counterinsurgent rhetoric. In her book Imperial Pharmakon\, Sandhya Shetty acknowledges the bile on display in colonial discourse on native bodies\, but maintains that medicine as a “tool of empire” was never consistently oppressive\, evenly commanding\, or unrelievedly prosaic in its articulations. Guided by the insight that “what makes power hold good\, what makes it accepted\, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no\, but that … it induces pleasure\, forms of knowledge\,” she tells a thick and tangled story about Western medicine’s divided enunciations and desultory goals\, and\, its erratic and errant reception on colonial soil. \nAttentive to the diverse ways in which desire for and pleasure in self-improvement inspired Indians to bold even risky experiments\, she argues that an exclusive focus on medicine’s combative posture risks singularizing what the archive nudges us to grasp as plural\, volatile\, and at times even generative. Reading this archive through a literary-critical lens\, the book distills a rich\, mixed brew of driving ideas and affects on both sides of the colonial divide\, drawing out medicine’s ability to stir the imagination of better worlds\, to liberate colonial subjects from ascriptive roles and to harbor a hostile war-making logic. \nIn her presentation\, Sandhya Shetty will expand on the conceptual infrastructure that bolsters the empirical details of the historical figures and events she discusses. Keywords such as “biopolitics\,” “ecology\,” “entanglement\,” and “pharmakon” are methodologically and substantively significant to her arguments\, while the friend/enemy dyad and the notion of “hospitality” help to formulate the ethical impasses of medicine in colonial conditions. She will also address the question of the Medical Humanities and conclude with reflections on the potency of the pharmakon as it moves this century toward engineering “new humans\,” quite unlike those birthed in colonial India circa 1835. The presentation will conclude with an audience Q&A. \n\n\nEmpire\, Ecologies\, Entanglements\nRSVP here (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd4wXQ5Wp0ZsiicFGJHziDNsfr48QmrvqnHcxFlc8qLgEVjZg/viewform?usp=publish-editor)\n*Speaker*: Sandhya Shetty\n*Event Categories*: Books\, Health & Wellness\, History\, Public Health\, Science\, Society
URL:https://bangaloreinternationalcentre.org/event/the-worlds-of-colonial-medicine/
LOCATION:Bangalore International Centre\, 7\, 4th Main Road\, Domlur II Stage\, Bangalore\, Karnataka\, 560071\, India
CATEGORIES:Books,Health & Wellness,History,Public Health,Science,Society
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