My research interests lie at the intersection of two broad theoretical trajectories—i) the history of biology as a discipline, and the concomitant question of how the rise of biology as an established scientific discipline from the 17th century onward reshaped the boundaries between life and death in ontology and politics, and ii) theories of sovereignty in the modern era and the related question of how the sovereign apparatus of the nation-state, in particular, seeks to capture, discipline, manage and sometimes extinguish forms of human “life.” The focus of my work, in terms of locale, is primarily postcolonial South and Southeast Asia. My published and forthcoming works have drawn upon either or both of the trajectories mentioned above. My first publication on the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s “national” epic The Discovery of India (published 1946) argued that the biological concept-metaphor of “life” is a key metaphorical component of ideologies of nationalism as it seeks to take over and invigorate the state-apparatus that has presumably been robbed of its vitality by the “vampire” of colonialism. A forthcoming publication titled “Kounter me, Rape us: Bare Life and the Mimicry of the Sovereign” analyzes two cases from South Asia (one literary and the other a real-life incident) where victims of gendered forms of violence expose the dark and absolutist imperatives of sovereign power in public space via acts that “bare” the brutalized and maimed body. I plan to bring together these two areas of interest in my planned book length study of post-1980 literary fictions based in India’s northeastern borderlands. My book project is tentatively titled “Rewriting Nation-State: Fiction and the State of Exception.”
Courses:
At Ball State, I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in postcolonial literature and theory, world literature and cultural studies. In the future, I plan to teach courses in film analysis and undergraduate seminars on the ethico-political questions raised by “monstrous” figures (such as mutants, zombies, werewolves and cyborgs) in post-1945 popular culture. I am an avid reader of science fiction and love watching movies from around the world.
Dr. Baishya's curriculum vitae