Legacies of French colonialism in India: Suchitra Vijayan in conversation with Jessica Namakkal

By Suchitra Vijayan March 1, 2022

Suchitra Vijayan sits down with author Jessica Namakkal to discuss her book “Unsettling Utopia”. The book presents a new account of the history of twentieth-century French India to show how colonial projects persisted beyond formal decolonization. Through the experience of the French territories, Namakkal recasts the relationships among colonization, settlement, postcolonial sovereignty, utopianism, and liberation, considering questions of borders, exile, violence, and citizenship from the margins. She demonstrates how state-sponsored decolonization—the bureaucratic process of transferring governance from an imperial state to a postcolonial state—rarely aligned with local desires.

 

Jessica Namakkal

Jessica Namakkal is associate professor of the practice in international comparative studies; gender, sexuality, and feminist studies; and history at Duke University.

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Suchitra Vijayan is the author of the critically acclaimed book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India (Melville House, New York) and How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (Pluto Press). She is 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction. She is an award-winning photographer and the founder and executive director of the Polis Project, a New York-based magazine of dissent. She teaches at NYU Gallatin and Columbia University, and is the Chairperson of the International Human Rights Committee. Her essays, photographs, and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Nation, The Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Rumpus, Electric Literature, NPR, NBC, Time, and BBC. As an attorney, she worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo for Iraqi refugees.

Legacies of French colonialism in India: Suchitra Vijayan in conversation with Jessica Namakkal


Suchitra Vijayan is the author of the critically acclaimed book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India (Melville House, New York) and How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (Pluto Press). She is 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction. She is an award-winning photographer and the founder and executive director of the Polis Project, a New York-based magazine of dissent. She teaches at NYU Gallatin and Columbia University, and is the Chairperson of the International Human Rights Committee. Her essays, photographs, and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Nation, The Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Rumpus, Electric Literature, NPR, NBC, Time, and BBC. As an attorney, she worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo for Iraqi refugees.