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Priyamvada Gopal: Difference between revisions

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Priyamvada Gopal
Gopal in 2019
Born	1968 (age 55–56)
Title	Professor of Postcolonial Studies
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Delhi Jawaharlal Nehru University Cornell University
Thesis	Midnight's labors: Gender, nation and narratives of social transformation in transitional India, 1932–1954 (2000)
Doctoral advisor	Biodun Jeyifo[1]
Academic work
Institutions	University of Cambridge Churchill College

Priyamvada Gopal (born 1968)^[2] is an Indian-born academic and writer who is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her primary teaching and research interests are in colonial and postcolonial studies, South Asian literature, critical race studies, and the politics and cultures of empire and globalisation.^[3] She has written three books on these subjects: Literary Radicalism in India (2005), The Indian English Novel (2009) and Insurgent Empire (2019).^[4]

Gopal's work has appeared in newspapers and online, and she has contributed occasionally to radio and television programmes in Britain and elsewhere.^[3][5] Her remarks about race and empire have gained media attention and condemnation, including over her abuse of other scholars and for alleged anti-Semitism.^[6][7][8] In 2021, she was named one of the world's top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine.^[9]

Biography

Early life

Gopal was born in Delhi, India. The daughter of an Indian diplomat, she spent her childhood in India, Sri Lanka and Bhutan, and attended an international high school in Vienna, where her father served as a diplomat in the mid-1980s.^[10][11] She is from a Brahmin family; she is a critic of the caste system.^[12][13]

Education and career

Gopal received a BA in English from the University of Delhi in 1989 and an MA in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1991. She then moved to the United States and received an MA in English from Purdue University in 1993.^{[citation needed]}AtCornell University she earnt an MA in English in 1996 ^{[citation needed]} and a PhD in colonial and postcolonial literature in 2000.^[3][14][15]

She began her teaching career as a graduate instructor in the Department of English at Cornell University in 1995.^{[citation needed]} She joined Connecticut College in 1999 as an Assistant Professor of English leaving in 2000.^{[citation needed]} She moved to the University of Cambridge in 2001, where she is professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of English and a teaching fellow at Churchill College.^[3][14][16] From 2006 to 2010, she was Dean of Churchill College.^[14]

Her third book, Insurgent Empire, was shortlisted for the 2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.^[17][18]

Academic research

British Empire

Gopal has written extensively about the impact of empire on contemporary culture in Britain and examined its broader social and cultural effects in South Asia and other former colonial societies.^{[19][20][21][22]}

In her 2019 book Insurgent Empire, Gopal examines traditions of dissent on the question of empire and shows how rebellions and resistance in the colonies influenced British critics of empire in a process she calls "reverse tutelage".^[23][24]

Decolonisation

Gopal believes decolonisation is about a process of thinking about our intellectual, personal and political formation in a historical frame.^[25][26] In relation to cultural and intellectual work, she argues that decolonisation poses different kinds of questions in different contexts about our relationship to colonialism.^[26] She draws on Ngũgĩ and Fanon to argue that Europe's material, cultural and intellectual riches also cannot be separated from its encounters with the Global South.^[26]

In Gopal supported a group of Cambridge students who asked the university to include more black and ethnic minority writers in its English literature curriculum^[27][28]

Race

Gopal has argued that whiteness is primarily a cultural category, not a biological one, and is useful for explaining how western societies work in terms of how society is structured.^[29][30][31]In October 2019, Gopal criticised the Equality and Human Rights Commission report "Tackling racial harassment: Universities challenged" for its language and not addressing the systemic disadvantages faced by black and minority ethnic students .^[32]

Controversies

Winston Churchill working group at Churchill College

In October 2020, Gopal joined a working group at Churchill College to critically examine Winston Churchill's views and actions relating to empire and race.^[33][34][35] In June 2021, college Master Athene Donald ended the Working Group's role after a dispute between the College Council and the working party.^[36][35][34] Gopal publically critised the manner in which the group had been dissolved.^{[34][35][37][38][39]}

King's College racial profiling dispute

In June 2018, Gopal alleged racial profiling by college porters at the gate of King's College, Cambridge.^{[40][41][42][43][44]} In October 2018, King's announced that it would put in place a "clearer and simpler means of reporting incidents" and that it would review its procedures for handling complaints.^[45]

Daily Mail false allegations against Gopal

In November 2020, the Daily Mail issued an apology and paid £25,000 in damages to Gopal after an opinion piece by Amanda Platell published in June 2020 falsely alleged that Gopal was "attempting to incite a race war and that she supported and endorsed the subjugation and persecution of white people" based on fake Twitter posts attributed to Gopal.^{[46][47][48][49]}

Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report (UK) criticism

In 2021, Gopal strongly critised the report issued by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities about race and ethnic disparities in the UK.^[50] Gopal argued the report cherry-picked data and minimised and denied structural and institutional racism..^{[51][52][53][54][55][56]}

Antisemitism dispute

In January 2022, Gopal criticised an article published in The Daily TelegraphbyDavid Abulafia concerning the acquittal of the protesters who toppled the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020.^[57][58][59] A subsequent public dispute took place between Gopal and Abulafia about the article, in particular a further piece in Varsity.^{[60][61][8][62][63]}

The Cambridge University Jewish Society and Abulafia, noting that both Abulafia and the student journalist writing in Varsity were Jewish, condemned Gopal's remarks as evoking antisemitic conspiracy theories.^[63][64] Gopal released a statement asserting that Varsity had "published misleading and false claims" about her words.^[65] The Cambridge Branch of the University and College Union also issued a statement supporting Gopal and condemning journalists in "the right-wing press" and Varsity for misrepresenting her views.^[66]

Bibliography

Books

• Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (Routledge, 2005)^[67]
• The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (Oxford University Press, 2009)^[68]
• Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso, 2019)^[24]

Articles

• "Of Victims and Vigilantes: The "Bandit Queen" Controversy". Thamyris Amsterdam. vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 73–102 (1997)^[69]
• "'Curious Ironies': Matter and Meaning in Bhabhani Bhattacharya's Novel of the 1943 Bengal Famine". ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 61–88 (2001)^[70]
• "Sex, space and modernity in the work of Rashid Jahan, "Angareywali"". Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies. pp. 150–166 (2002)^[71]
• "Reading subaltern history". The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. pp. 139–161 (2004)^[72]
• "The'Moral Empire': Africa, globalisation and the politics of conscience". New Formations. issue 59, pp. 81–98 (2006)^[73]
• "Concerning Maoism: Fanon, Revolutionary Violence, and Postcolonial India". South Atlantic Quarterly. vol. 112, no. 1, pp. 115–128 (2013)^[74]
• "Speaking with Difficulty: Feminism and Antiracism in Britain after 9/11". Feminist Studies. vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 98–118 (2013)^[75]
• "Redressing anti-imperial amnesia". Race & Class. vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 18–30 (2016)^[76]
• "Of Capitalism and Critique: 'Af-Pak' Fiction in the Wake of 9/11". South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations. pp. 21–36 (2016)^[77]
• "On Decolonisation and the University". Textual Practice. vol. 35, no. 6, pp. 873–899 (2021)^[78]

References

External links

• University of Cambridge Staff Profile
• Churchill College, Cambridge Staff Profile
• Bhakti Shringarpure, "A Demanding Relationship with History: A Conversation with Priyamvada Gopal", Los Angeles Review of Books, 30 August 2021.