Thesis Eleven Annual Lecture: Who is afraid of decoloniality?

You are warmly invited to the 2024 Thesis Eleven Annual Lecture. This year Professor Ira Raja (University of Delhi) joins us to discuss the challenges of decoloniality and the persistence of India's precolonial social hierarchies. This event is hosted by and supported by the .

This is a free event, all welcome, reception to follow the main event.

While decolonial theory often focuses on the binary between colonizer and colonized, it overlooks the internal divisions among the colonized, particularly the long-standing hierarchies within Indian society itself—such as between upper-caste Hindus and Dalits. As historical research in recent years has shown, caste was deeply institutionalized in precolonial India, challenging the view that colonialism was the sole driver of caste rigidification. The deployment of decolonial rhetoric by contemporary right-wing movements, further complicates decoloniality, as it often ignores caste-based inequalities in favor of a romanticized, undifferentiated vision of indigenous purity. This presentation underscores the need for decolonial theory to confront these internal hierarchies and avoid simplifying colonial histories to absolve dominant groups of moral responsibility.

Ira Raja is an academic and researcher specializing in contemporary Indian literature and cultural theory. She is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Delhi. Her scholarship examines how social hierarchies, particularly those related to caste, gender, and age, shape narratives of identity and belonging in modern India. Among her recent publications is the essay "Nation and Ageing: Mother India’s Mutable Body", featured in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Literature and Film (2023).

The Thesis Eleven Annual Lectures commenced in 2002. Lecturers have included Bernard Smith, George Markus, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Joanna Bourke, Maria Pia Lara, Stuart Macintyre, Alastair Davidson, Philippa Mein Smith, George Steinmetz, Ron Jacobs and Eleanor Townsley, Peter Thomas, Krishan Kumar, Keith Tester, Nikos Papastergiadis, Chiara Bottici, Noeleen Murray, Emilia Palonen, Michael Peters, Peter Beilharz, Susan L Robertson and Jeff Alexander. In 2020 there was no lecture, but the Covid Crisis Series online instead.

Host or Publisher Thesis Eleven Journal