Ben Conisbee Baer
Biographic Data
| ID | 1223662 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben Conisbee Baer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben Conisbee |
| FAMILY NAME | Baer |
| SIGNATURE | BAER B C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 7 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 7 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Other Knows Best
This article reflects on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003) twenty years after its first publication. The discipline of Comparative Literature was not reborn in line with Spivak’s elegiac imperatives. Yet Death of a Discipline’s argument—that literary reading may affirm a certain vagueness and non-knowledge in the outlines of alterity—remains a compelling resource in a world of STEM, calculable probability, and the power of…
Violent elements
Helium dramatizes a traumatized witness's attempt to write about India's 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom. Depicting his attempt to write an investigative confession of complicity, the novel discloses larger patterns of fantasy, sexual economy, and gender violence that make the pogrom and his own self-story possible. Through a complex narrative framework, Helium shows that unlike legal redress, justice is never present but haunts the present from a future a…
South Asian Literary Studies, for Better and Worse
(2017). South Asian Literary Studies, for Better and Worse. South Asian Review: Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 63-67
It’s Only the End of the World
Elaborating Barbara Cassin’s category of the Untranslatable, Emily Apter’s Against World Literature demonstrates the Untranslatable’s performative capability to question and displace the voracity of the World Literature industry. Neither a primer nor a how-to, Apter’s new book ranges across a wide assortment of texts to disclose the Untranslatable as a political and textual event indigestible by and unprofitable to the prevailing practices of Wor…
Spivak Lessons
Shit Writing
Shit Writing: Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable, the Image of Gandhi, and the Progressive Writers' Association Ben Conisbee Baer (bio) Between Colony and Metropolis The final page of Untouchable, the breakthrough 1935 novel by Indo-Anglian author Mulk Raj Anand, contains a two-line paraph: "Simla-S.S. Viceroy of India-Bloomsbury" reads the first of these lines. "September-October 1933" reads the second.1 A flourish below the novel's main text, these l…
Redoing Marxism at the Gigi Café
In an autobiographical and theoretical conversation, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ben Conisbee Baer discuss issues arising from the twentieth anniversary of the journal Rethinking Marxism. Moving from a personal discussion of their respective entryways into reading Marx in India and Britain in the 1950s and the 1980s, Spivak and Baer discuss theoretical questions that have been central for the journal's project during the past twenty years: the…
Shit Writing
Shit Writing: Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable, the Image of Gandhi, and the Progressive Writers' Association Ben Conisbee Baer (bio) Between Colony and Metropolis The final page of Untouchable, the breakthrough 1935 novel by Indo-Anglian author Mulk Raj Anand, contains a two-line paraph: "Simla-S.S. Viceroy of India-Bloomsbury" reads the first of these lines. "September-October 1933" reads the second.1 A flourish below the novel's main text, these l…
Spivak Lessons
Redoing Marxism at the Gigi Café
In an autobiographical and theoretical conversation, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ben Conisbee Baer discuss issues arising from the twentieth anniversary of the journal Rethinking Marxism. Moving from a personal discussion of their respective entryways into reading Marx in India and Britain in the 1950s and the 1980s, Spivak and Baer discuss theoretical questions that have been central for the journal's project during the past twenty years: the…
Shit Writing
Shit Writing: Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable, the Image of Gandhi, and the Progressive Writers' Association Ben Conisbee Baer (bio) Between Colony and Metropolis The final page of Untouchable, the breakthrough 1935 novel by Indo-Anglian author Mulk Raj Anand, contains a two-line paraph: "Simla-S.S. Viceroy of India-Bloomsbury" reads the first of these lines. "September-October 1933" reads the second.1 A flourish below the novel's main text, these l…
Spivak Lessons
It’s Only the End of the World
Elaborating Barbara Cassin’s category of the Untranslatable, Emily Apter’s Against World Literature demonstrates the Untranslatable’s performative capability to question and displace the voracity of the World Literature industry. Neither a primer nor a how-to, Apter’s new book ranges across a wide assortment of texts to disclose the Untranslatable as a political and textual event indigestible by and unprofitable to the prevailing practices of Wor…
South Asian Literary Studies, for Better and Worse
(2017). South Asian Literary Studies, for Better and Worse. South Asian Review: Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 63-67
Violent elements
Helium dramatizes a traumatized witness's attempt to write about India's 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom. Depicting his attempt to write an investigative confession of complicity, the novel discloses larger patterns of fantasy, sexual economy, and gender violence that make the pogrom and his own self-story possible. Through a complex narrative framework, Helium shows that unlike legal redress, justice is never present but haunts the present from a future a…
Other Knows Best
This article reflects on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003) twenty years after its first publication. The discipline of Comparative Literature was not reborn in line with Spivak’s elegiac imperatives. Yet Death of a Discipline’s argument—that literary reading may affirm a certain vagueness and non-knowledge in the outlines of alterity—remains a compelling resource in a world of STEM, calculable probability, and the power of…
Art (4 works) · History (4 works) · History (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Literature (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Sociology (4 works)