Writers & Scholars Series - Deepka Bhari

Deepika Bahri is Professor of English at Emory University. She specializes in postcolonial and world literature, Frankfurt School critical theory, race, culture, postcolonial theory, political aesthetics and philosophical discourses of utopia and the good life. She has secondary interests in human health. She is director of the interdisciplinary program in Global and Postcolonial Studies.

Her publications include Postcolonial Biology: Psyche and Flesh after Empire (Univ of Minnesota Press, 2017); Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature (Univ of Minnesota Press, 2003); 2 edited books;  and over 30 articles and chapters, most recently "Hybridity Redux."  PMLA, 132.1 (Jan. 2017): 142-48. Native Intelligence models a variety of readings that arise from an understanding of aesthetic form as neither incidental nor merely ornamental, but as central to the ideological and political content of postcolonial literature. Postcolonial Biology uses theories of neurobiological plasticity, embodied cognition, and epigenetics to explore the impact of imperial domination on colonized bodies and minds, and their ongoing transformation in today’s global order. Moving beyond “North/South” thinking, the book power examines questions of power over life and lifeways in the relay from colonialism to a late capitalist, consumption-driven world under new forms of empire in all societies.