Thursday February 6, 2025 – 5pm, Foster 103
Anusha Hariharan, Assistant Professor, Department of Global Interdisciplinary Studies, Villanova University
Based on ethnographic work with feminist collectives in Tamil Nadu, this talk attends to the intermediations between embodied, intimate feminist solidarities and the construction of feminist memory in intergenerational political spaces. In tracking Tamil feminists’ contextual use of thalaimurai (generations) in political life as marking transformations in activist imaginaries and shifting conceptions of the political, this talk explores an intermediation where the mediated object—memory—also serves as the mediating device. In doing so, it examines how embodied feminist friendships and intimacies mediate the construction of memory that feminists perform as a form of care for themselves and their histories, and how memory-work mediates the formation of new relationalities between generations, thus raising important questions for what political inheritance could mean for feminists in postcolonial South Asia.