The Society for the End of Necropolitics: Unnatural Appetites and Numberless Victims. A Brief History of Starvation in South Asia.
with Madhusree Mukerjee and Natasha Ginwala

JUL
12
Talk and discussion
8–10 pm
Fridericianum, Friedrichsplatz 18, Kassel
Live stream available

Devastating famines were routine in British India, resulting from the way in which the colony was forcibly incorporated into the global economy. For almost two centuries, revenues flowed from the colony to its captor, contributing to the early industrialization of the United Kingdom while reducing India to a nation of paupers. “Civilization today caters to a whole population of gluttons,” wrote the poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1921. “A civilization which has attained such an unnatural appetite must, for its continuing existence, depend upon numberless victims.” Broadly speaking, colonialism, in conjunction with the slave trade, established the economic inequality between the First World and the Third World still evident today. Economic exploitation of colonies intensified during wars, causing the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed an estimated three million. Independence in 1947 led to substantial improvements in nutrition. In India, however, the trend has been halted or possibly even reversed by neoliberal “reforms” introduced in the 1990s, which reduced the nation’s economic sovereignty and plunged its agriculture into crisis. Even as India exports crops, farmers are committing suicide or abandoning agriculture at unprecedented rates, and almost ten percent of the population is in a state of incipient famine.


Madhusree Mukerjee is a journalist and author of two books, Churchill’s Secret War: The Ravaging of British India during World War II (Basic Books, 2010) and The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

Posted in Public Programs
Related

The Parliament of Bodies: The Strategy of Joy

with Ross Birrell, Nita Deda, Hendrik Folkerts, Dimitris Ginosatis, Natasha Ginwala, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Balitronica Gómez, Jack Halberstam, Trajal Harrell, Candice Hopkins, iQhiya, Élisabeth Lebovici, Catherine Malabou, Joar Nango, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Paul B. Preciado, Ibrahim Quraishi, Roee Rosen, Dim Sampaio, and Adam Szymczyk

A paradox lies at the heart of contemporary democratic societies concerning the center of the politics of representations of their parliaments: They have gradually turned into ensembles joined by fear…

 More
Calendar

Were the anxieties around immigration and globalization any different in antiquity?

with Dr. Naman P. Ahuja and Natasha Ginwala

There are fears that globalization is making different cultural identities homogeneous, yet it often enables a cosmopolitanism that enables different local practices to coexist although some differences…

 More
Calendar

Matter Form Facture

with Geeta Kapur and Natasha Ginwala

The choice of the title, Matter Form Facture, signals my continued engagement with a materialist aesthetic that counterbalances the disdain with which conceptual, mediatic, and textual forms of contemporaneity…

 More
Calendar

In Memoriam: Lala Rukh (1948–2017)

by Natasha Ginwala

During a visit to Lahore in September 2015, we converged in Lala’s home; the door to her backyard garden lay open and a light breeze drifted in. I soon learned that this garden had been transformed into…

 More
Notes

The documenta 14 Reader and documenta 14: Daybook

with Ross Birrell, Moyra Davey, Natasha Ginwala, Hiwa K, Quinn Latimer, Isabell Lorey, Adam Szymczyk, and Katerina Tselou

Please join documenta 14 Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk and Editor-in-Chief of Publications Quinn Latimer in celebrating the publications of The documenta 14 Reader and documenta 14: Daybook (both Prestel…

 More
Calendar

Native Foreigners

with Natasha Ginwala, Kyrillos Sarris, and Cecilia Vicuña

Guests open up current forms and strategies of artistic self-determination beyond, behind, or within institutions. The program brings together fans and scholars alike across space and time, for discussions…

 More
Calendar