Audacious Raconteurs of Colonial India: A Discussion with Leela Prasad

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs

South Asia Center presents

Audacious Raconteurs of Colonial India: A Discussion with Leela Prasad

The Audacious Raconteur (Cornell University Press, 2020) engages history, anthropology, literary studies, and religion to argue that even the most hegemonic circumstances cannot suppress “audacious raconteurs”: skilled storytellers who fashion narrative spaces that allow themselves to remain sovereign and beyond subjugation.  Four Indian narrators of different castes and religious backgrounds who lived in colonial India—an ayah, a lawyer, an archaeologist, and a librarian—show that the audacious raconteur is a necessary ethical and artistic figure in human experience.

Joanne Punzo Waghorne, Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, will talk with Dr. Prasad about her book and its contributions. 

Leela Prasad

Professor, Religious Studies 

Duke University

Leela Prasad is Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University.  Her primary interests are the anthropology of ethics, with a focus on South Asia, colonialism & decoloniality, prison pedagogy & Gandhi, and religion & modernity. Her work is at the intersections of religious studies, anthropology, history and literature. 

Co-sponsored by the Department of Religion.

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For more information, please contact Emera Bridger Wilson, elbridge@syr.edu or to request additional accommodations, please contact Morgan Bicknell, mebickne@syr.edu.