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Friendship as Political Practice: Reorienting Solidarity in a Globalised World
(NWO-VENI 2024 Postdoctoral research, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis)

Public spheres across the globe today are multiple and dynamic, but also ever more brittle and fractured. Their ability to build and re-build shared worlds is increasingly imperilled by divisive developments, including resurgent authoritarianisms, ethnonationalisms, political polarisation, war, and mass displacement. In this fraught context, critical theorists have focused on solidarity as a conceptual framework and practice to help democracies to address these challenges. Amid these discussions, an emerging line of inquiry identifies friendship as a model to conceptualise solidarity. However, the promise of friendship as a paradigm for democratic emancipatory solidarity has not, until now been realised. Common objections are that friendship is regarded as a private choice that privileges similarity—thus clashing with the difference that characterises the polis—and that its supposed benefits remain uncertain in political practice. Consequently, friendship’s reparative capacity to reorient solidarity in today’s fractured public spheres remains largely unexplored.

Friendship as Political Practice (FPP) advances a concept of political friendship to address these conceptual limitations. It does so by mobilising literary imaginations of friendship across three non-European contexts, from India, Middle East, and the Caribbean. FPP takes a decolonial and non-nationalist approach to study a hitherto ignored corpus of non-Western paradigms of friendship.

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Poetic Understanding and Political Community: Actualizing Plurality through Poetry
(PhD project, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, 2016-2022)

In this project, I propose an intersubjective pragmatist framework for reading poetry that takes the actualization of a decolonial and anti-identitarian political plurality as the basis of poetry’s politicality. At its core is the concept of ‘poetic understanding’: a transformative quality of understanding that is a necessarily dynamic, contingent, non-hierarchical, and anti-identitarian process of transformation and constitution, where who I am comes to be constituted in my process of understanding, as does who the other is. I develop this framework by bringing together four distinct conceptual fields: I build on Hannah Arendt’s theory of political plurality, Édouard Glissant’s concepts of relation and opacity, John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of aesthetic experience, and Sylvia Wynter’s model of decipherment to examine poetry as a site of intersubjective transformation, where a genuine plurality of relation in interaction, divested of discriminatory and hierarchizing mechanics, can be actualized. In such a conceptualization of poetic understanding, I argue, lies an as-yet-underestimated cornerstone of solidary understanding, and the crux of poetry’s political contribution.

Supervisors: Prof. Ellen Rutten, Prof. Josef Früchtl
(Defense date: 11 November 2022)

2023 -

Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam

2022 - 2023

Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam
- Philosophy, Race, Media, and the Arts (BA Seminar) (Nov - Dec 2022)

Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam
- Intercultural Dialogues (MA Seminar) (Sep - Oct 2022)
- Poetic, Rhetorical and Visual Analysis (BA Seminar) (Sep - Oct 2022)
- Narratology and Discourse Analysis  (BA Seminar) (Nov 2022 - Jan 2023)
- Historicism, Anachronism, Memory: How Not to Take Contexts for Granted (BA Seminar) (Apr - June 2023)

2019 - 2022

Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis, BA, University of Amsterdam
- Literary Worlds (Lecture) (Feb - Mar 2022)
- Analysis and Interpretation (Seminar) (Oct 2020 - Jan 2021)
- Contexts and Frames (Seminar) (Apr - Jun 2020)
- BA Thesis supervision (Thesis) (Feb - June 2020)
- Aesthetics and Politics (Lecture) (Sep - Oct 2019)

Academic Core, BA, Amsterdam University College
- Academic Writing Skills (Core course) (Sep -Dec 2019)

Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE), BA, Amsterdam
- Race, Gender, Sexuality and Popular Culture (May - June 2019)

2018 -2019

Academic Core, BA, Amsterdam University College
- Academic Writing Skills (Core course) (Sep - Dec 2018)

2012-2014

Lecturer BA, Literary and English Studies
Ramnarain Ruia College, University of Mumbai (Mumbai, India)
Courses :
- Introduction to Postcolonial literatures
- Romantic and Victorian literature
- British Modernism
- Introduction to literary theory
- Introduction to Feminism
- 20th century American Literature
- Contemporary Indian English literature