Debashish Banerji

• Doctor of Philosophy
• California Institute of Integral Studies

The book is about what posthumanism means in the contemporary Indian context and what different lines of consideration this can take. The world today has universalized a Eurocentric history of the human with its privileges, oppressions, exploitations and exclusions. On the one hand, this has led to the triumphalist narrative of technology, the blur...

The book is about what posthumanism means in the contemporary Indian context and what different lines of consideration this can take. The world today has universalized a Eurocentric history of the human with its privileges, oppressions, exploitations and exclusions. On the one hand, this has led to the triumphalist narrative of technology, the blur...

The book is about what posthumanism means in the contemporary Indian context and what different lines of consideration this can take. The world today has universalized a Eurocentric history of the human with its privileges, oppressions, exploitations and exclusions. On the one hand, this has led to the triumphalist narrative of technology, the blur...

Started in 1968 on a circular patch of barren land of 1.6 mile radius in Tamil Nadu, India, Auroville was conceived as a city-state that belonged to humanity as a whole. Inhabitants of Auroville were united in a vision of human self-transcendence and integrality based in the teachings of the Indian yogi-philosopher Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual p...

Philosophical Posthumanism is a recent area of scholarship which Francesca Ferrando has introduced in her eponymous book. The author situates the subject as one closely related to Critical Posthumanism and Cultural Posthumanism. She also discusses its close relatives such as Transhumanism and its forebears such as Antihumanism and Poststructuralism...

Our world is increasingly torn between the cultural polarities of a homogenized neo-liberal globalization and a variety of exclusionary fundamentalisms. The text being discussed opens a third space of what it calls ‘convergent pluralism’ between these two, that promises to evolve a harmonious planetary future. The present article discusses the anal...

The turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century saw a number of philosophers of conscious evolution emerging from different cultural backgrounds. This paper argues that this phenomenon, which has sometimes been seen as a philosophical consequence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory in the life sciences, is more importantly related to the enhanced scope of...

This chapter introduces the concept of the volume and its constituent essays. Critical Posthumanism has received increasing attention in recent times; but this volume attempts to open a new chapter in posthuman studies by bringing South Asian postcolonial considerations into the scholarship, with regard both to their subaltern critiques and their a...

This volume is a critical exploration of multiple posthuman possibilities in the 21st century and beyond. Due to the global engagement with advanced technology, we are witness to a species-wise blurring of boundaries at the edge of the human. On the one hand, we find ourselves in a digital age in which human identity is being transformed through ne...

This essay deals with subject formation as a dynamic negotiation between self, community, and the public space of modernity. The ideological mythologies which structure the public space of the modern nation are reflected in processes of self-identification at the individual level. This relation can be mediated by the intersubjective space of the po...

This essay introduces the intent, scope, and other essays of the anthology. It engages with the question of the significance of Rabindranath Tagore in our times, both in the milieu of his birth, Bengal, and in the world. Significance here refers also to both senses of the operation of Rabindranath Tagore as a sign or “author function” in the milieu...

This critical volume addresses the question of Rabindranath Tagore's relevance for postmodern and postcolonial discourse in the twenty-first century. The volume includes contributions by leading contemporary scholars on Tagore and analyses Tagore's literature, music, theatre, aesthetics, politics and art against contemporary theoretical development...

The first part of this essay considers Sri Aurobindo’s nationalism and contextualizes it within the colonial-national interchange and the modern understanding of the nation. It then problematizes Hindutva’s attempts to reductively appropriate Sri Aurobindo’s pluralistic and evolutionary nationalism. In the second part, a close reading is conducted...

This book describes the scheme of yoga followed by modern philosopher-yogi Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), which framed his diaries of self-study (svadhyaya). It is also a new approach to psychology as a philosophical praxis for integral transformation.

Hindu thought fascinated the colonial gaze which stretched from a certain revulsion for what it deemed barbaric irrationalism to romanticized adulation of exotic supernatural isms. These attitudes also impacted inexorably on mainstream Indian thought in and from 19th century inscribed themselves into indigenous self-understanding, educational and a...

“Debashish Banerji's study of Abanindranath is a significant addition to existing scholarship. Departing from the received tradition of looking at Abanindranath as an artist shackled by his commitments to nationalism he recognizes the complexity cross-cultural encounters bring to the colonial world and locates Abanindranath squarely within this new...