A lecture by Nusrat Chowdhury (Amherst College).
In this talk, Dr. Chowdhury takes the birth centennial of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of independent Bangladesh, as a point of entry in exploring the generative potential of mimicry in contemporary democracies. The repertoire of signs around the figure of Mujib around this historical moment (2021 marking the country’s 50th anniversary of Bangladesh) allows a vantage point from which to understand Bangladeshi political culture that came into sharp focus with the condensation of corporeal and symbolic energies around the replication of the leader’s likeness. The talk centers on the English-language novel, The Black Coat by Neamat Imam (2013), which pivots on the theme of impersonation and ends with the ongoing religious opposition to anthropomorphic reproductions. Chowdhury argues that the compulsion to mimic via statues, photographs, works of art, or reenactment ceremonies carries within it an ambivalent and generative politics. In every act of mimesis there is both a promise and a menace. Modern sovereign power manages this uncertainty through the specular and the spectacular, or what I describe as “monumentalised reproducibility.”
This lecture is part of the Rethinking Public Religion in Africa and South Asia project at IRCPL (in collaboration with the Institute for African Studies and the South Asia Institute). The project is funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.
Nusrat S Chowdhury is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College. She writes and teaches on protest, popular sovereignty, and political communication. Her first book, Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh is an ethnography of crowd politics. Her current book project explores the concept of sacrifice in relation to development megaprojects in Bangladesh by looking closely into the role and the ruse of language - of rumor, policies, politics, and international law. In 2020-21, she is a Member at Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.