In India, various processes have congealed in the last three decades to rid cities of perceived ‘dirt.’ This is seen in state-commissioned urban improvement schemes that claim to instill regional and civic pride, as part of which street artists are instrumentalized within urban beautification and cleanliness drives. Notably,…
In May 2019, I attended and spoke at a conference — “Reading in the Age of Trump: The Politics and Possibility of Literary Studies Now” — hosted by Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. As the organizers explain, the conference aimed to “historicize the past two decades in literary criticism in order to examine its present politics and future possibility.” [1] Over the course of three days, the conference participants identified many of the twenty-first century’s […]