Wits University Archives vs Practices 2019

Wits University Archives vs Practices 2019

Centre for Indian Studies will host this lecture as part of the 3rd Thinking from the Global South Distinguished Lectures

Despite evidence of widespread and persistent multilingual literary tastes, aesthetics, and practices, literary archives in South Asia have been largely monolingual or selectively bilingual, and have erased all but traces of their subjects’ more diffuse multilingualism. This is true of pre-colonial archives, even before new ideas of language, community, and indigeneity under colonialism turned whole languages and traditions into aliens. Rather, in South Asia as elsewhere, attention to the multiple layers of informal as well as formal literary education, and to textual and contextual clues in the archives, help us reconstruct a richer and more connected picture of multilingual literary culture.