Plenary

Madhumita Lahiri is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Michigan, with an additional affiliation in the Department of Film, Television, and Media.

Her research examines the narratives that large, multiethnic democracies – such as India, South Africa, and the United States – construct about identity, community, and the boundaries of legitimate political belonging. She is particularly interested in how these societies imagine themselves and negotiate questions of difference, solidarity, and collective life.

In her first book, Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Forging of the Global Anglophone (Northwestern University Press, 2020), Professor Lahiri analyzed the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, M.K. Gandhi, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Although each figure is closely associated with a particular national context, their intellectual work reached far beyond those boundaries. Tagore, based in Bengal, wrote extensively about China and Japan; Gandhi, while best known as an Indian leader, lived in and wrote about South Africa; and Du Bois consistently engaged with India in writings aimed at Black American audiences. Lahiri argues that these thinkers practiced what she terms print internationalism, using the worldwide reach of the English language (what she calls the global Anglophone) to imagine alternative geographies, including the Global South, and to foster new forms of collective identity among people of color.

Professor Lahiri is currently working on a book titled How We Hate Now: Xenophobia in the Age of Antiracism. This project explores how immigrants are represented in an increasingly bordered and deglobalizing world. The book examines not only the rhetoric of explicitly anti-immigrant political movements, but also the often-overlooked ways in which contemporary fiction can reflect and reinforce increasingly closed social and political imaginaries.