Archives and Imagination: Thinking Across Comparison, Connection, and Solidarity

Dates: 25 June 2026

Schedule: 3:00 p.m.

Venue: ICS-ULisboa, Room 3

Organisation: Research Group IMPÉRIOS and ERA-Chair IMAGINE

Enrollment/attendance details:

Students that enroll and attend the mini-course Global Racisms and the Imagination of Just Futures - A Mini-Course and the Seminar by Professor Anupama Rao, Archives and Imagination: Thinking Across Comparison, Connection, and Solidarity (25th June, 3 p.m.) will qualify for 1 academic credit (ECTS-equivalent).

Mini-course & Seminar registration (open until June 19; no fee) here

Attendance: In-person presence is expected for credited participation.

Credit: 1 ECTS-equivalent upon verified attendance.

Once the domain of professional historians, the archive is increasingly viewed by subaltern communities as an open-access resource, and a work-in-progress. This talk approaches the archive as a repository of events and memory, as well as a site of contestation and creative interpretation. How do alternative archiving practices- excavation of fugitive archives, curation of visual and sonic collections, exploration of annotations and marginalia, data visualization- operate as alternative infrastructures of knowledge formation? How do they aid the production of critical publics and just futures? Can rethinking the archive and its relationship to historical truths provide the occasion for repair and redress through acts of imagination?

Bionote:

Anupama Rao is Professor of History and Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at the Barnard College, Columbia University, Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the convenor of the Ambedkar Initiative. She was the Principal Investigator for the Global Humanities Institute-CHCI (Mellon) grant, “Global Racisms, Cold War Humanism, and Just Futures,” and is the co-director of the project, “Geographies of Injustice,” hosted by Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. She is also working in a project titled Dalit Bombay, which explores the relationship between caste, political culture, and everyday life in colonial and postcolonial Bombay.

Professor Rao has written widely on the themes of colonialismo and post-colonial societies, comparative urbanism; and colonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism, and on non-Western histories of gender and sexuality. Her book, The Caste Question (2009) theorized caste subalternity, with specific focus on the role of anti-caste thought (and its thinkers) in producing alternative genealogies of political subject-formation. Recent publications include The Many Worlds of R. B. More: Memoir of a Dalit Communist with Wandana Sonalkar (Leftword, 2019), and the edited volume Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality (Women Unlimited, 2017). She is completing Ambedkar in America: Reading Castes in India, and coediting The Cambridge Companion to Ambedkar (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) with Shailaja Paik.