The Communication Department is looking forward to hosting Raka Shome as a speaker for their Colloquium. Shome is a media, communication, and cultural studies scholar. She has held faculty positions at the London School of Economics, Arizona State University, the University of Washington, and served as the 2011-12 Inaugural Harron Family (Visiting) Endowed Chair of Communication at Villanova University.
This talk is based on my book in progress: Cleansing the Nation (under contract, Duke University Press). It will focus on the workings of contemporary (and increasingly authoritarian) Hindu nationalism in India, particularly as they operate through ‘development’ initiatives. Focusing on a signature development campaign of the Hindu nationalist BJP government that has been highly popular and mediated—the “Clean India” campaign or Swachh Bharat Abhiyan—this talk will explore how the logic of Hindu modern, as a mode of contemporary governmentality, plays out in the Clean India campaign. In particular, this talk examines the regulation of gender (and its intersections with caste and religion) in the current Hindu nationalist (modern) project of cultural purification and explores how the Clean India campaign evinces this.
