Bipasha Bhattacharyya
Enlightenment Goes South. Reflections on Unreason in the Age of Reason
The talk will interrogate a claim that has had a great deal of traction in recent times: the claim that Enlightenment(s) were Eurocentric processes that went on to justify the logic of imperialism. At its worst, it holds that the study of Enlightenment(s) is not useful: it was specific to a moment in time and space and ne-
glected the stories of people from the “Global South”. I argue that this reading of Enlightenment(s) is both an oversimplification of Enlightenments high and
low, as well as a construction born of empirical evidence from the very Enlightenments that now stand cancelled. Beginning with a specific focus on this recent challenge to Enlightenment historiography, I will examine wider contexts that ultimately illustrate the senselessness of the category “global south” itself.
Bipasha Bhattacharyya is a third-year PhD Student (Department of History) and Trinity College’s Prince of Wales Student. She was a Prize Research Student in the year 2022 at the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, and continues to be an actively engaged in its proceedings. She also co-convened the Faculty of History’s World History Workshop for the academic year 2022–2023.
Bhattacharyya’s thesis develops her interest in constructed languages, language politics and pedagogy through an attempt to historicise Esperanto and the search for an International auxiliary language. Prior to coming to Cambridge, Bipasha read history at Presidency University, Kolkata. Her research interests include language politics, histories of international movements and of ideas, newspapers as historical sources, critical biographies, social and micro-history.
Vortrag im Rahmen der Tagung Enlightenment in the World
Lecture at the conference Enlightenment in the World