A conference at New York, 1 May 2010

The third meeting, to be held at the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University, will build on the Johannesburg and Mumbai discussion by placing Gandhian thought within a range of emergent research in the theory and history of global politics and publics. Weaving critical approaches to Enlightenment thought with new research in the transnational history of ideas, the “Afterlives of Nonviolence” will consider global conversations that informed and were elicited by Gandhi’s thought, such those between Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and between Tolstoy and Gandhi. The session will map intellectual exchanges across time and space while also returning with a critical eye to the concepts put forward in Hind Swaraj. Panelists will address the text itself through close readings and assess its relevance and possibilities for contemporary workings of notions of rights, sovereignty and liberation. Interested in the fertile possibilities of Gandhian categories, which defy classical liberal political models all the while enforcing democracy and self-determination, the discussion will use Gandhi as a lens through which to consider the emergence of new ethico-political imaginaries today.