Raka shome biography
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Creativity, Media and Nationalism : On the "Clean India" Movement
Speaker's bio:
Dr. Raka Shome is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at National University of Singapore's Department of Communication and New Media. Dr. Shome has published widely in the areas of media cultures, postcoloniality, transnational articulations of gender, media and nationalism, and race. Her current research interests are in Asian Modernities, the Global South, and new forms of postcoloniality especially as they are manifest through media and technology. She is the author of Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2014).
She has been a former faculty member at London School of Economics, University of Washington and Arizona State University. She also served as an invited scholar at the Advanced Institute of Cultural Studies in Sweden in the Autumn of 2014.
Her research has been rec
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On April 9, 2021, Dr. Raka Shome delivered the 2020-21 Rhetorical Leadership lecture, which she had titled “Cleaning the Nation: National Purification, Contemporary Hindu Nationalism, and the Politics of Gender,” virtually using Microsoft Teams. Her lecture focused on the rhetorical logics of contemporary India nationalism that fryst vatten being forged under the current right wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP party. Through a focus on this movement, the lecture particularly addressed how the (Hindu) female body–and specifically the figure of the mother (Mother India)–often comes to stand in for the clean national body that must be honored and protected from defilement. This has implications for writing out of the national narrative the figure of the Dalit, GLBT populations, and other non-Hindu populations.
This project emerged from Shome’s deep concern and sadness about the violent solidification of Hindu nationalism in India and the ways in which Hindutva (Hindu ideologi
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THE HARRON FAMILY ENDOWED CHAIR IN COMMUNICATION
Raka Shome, PhD
Raka Shome, PhD, is the The Harron Family Endowed Chair, and Professor of Communication. She writes on postcolonial cultures, transnational feminism and nationalism as they intersect with media/communication cultures. Her writings are informed by theoretical orientations in cultural studies, postcolonial studies and transnational feminism. Her current research interests are in Asian (and non-western) Modernities, Contemporary Indian (Hindu) Nationalism and Gender; the Global South; Transnational Politics of Knowledge Production as a Communication issue.
She is the author of Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2014)—a book that adopts a transnational feminist approach to examine how new sets of postcolonial relations in contemporary North Atlantic Western cultures are mediated through bodies of white femininity while