On Thursday 25 January 2018 at 6.30 pm.

About the talk:

Dalit art is a relatively new category. Investigations of Dalit art have conventionally been found as a part of anthropological or folklore studies and only in the past decade or so have there been discussions on the idea of Dalit art in art criticism or visual culture.  These discussions have taken either a recuperative route by invoking traditional Dalit practice or they have concentrated on the idea of visual imagery in the context of Dalits in the public sphere. In rare instances, there is a focus on a particular artist or work and these have, in many cases, been either very tentative or sharply polemical.  My paper is an attempt to examine possibilities through which one can engage the category ‘Dalit art’ in the interest of emancipatory politics.

About the speaker:

Deeptha Achar is a Professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, MS University. She studied English Literature at Bangalore University, Karnataka and Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad. She is on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Open Access journal Open Cultural Studies, launched by De Gruyter Open. Her publications include The Age of Adventure: Childhood, Reading and British Boys’ Fiction (2010) and she has co-edited Towards New Art History: Studies in Indian Art (2003), Discourse, Democracy, and Difference: Perspectives on Community, Politics, and Culture (2010) and Articulating Resistance: Art and Activism (2012) apart from catalog essays. Her research interests include visual culture and childhood studies. She is now editing a book on the early modern Karnataka artist K. Venkatappa with Pushpamala N.