Fung Public Seminar Series: Theory from the Trenches: Decolonization and the Storm of Subaltern Marxism

Shozab Raza

2024-25 Fung Global Fellow; Assistant Professor, University of Toronto

PIIRS, Princeton University

Shozab Raza completed his graduate training at the University of Toronto and the University of Oxford. His research and teaching focuses on imperialism, decolonization and revolutionary theory, especially in South Asia and the Global South. Shozab’s research has been published in several journals, including Cultural Anthropology and Comparative Studies in Society and History, while his public writing has appeared in venues like The Guardian and Boston Review. He is also a founding editor of Jamhoor, a critical left magazine on South Asia. At Princeton, he will be working on his book, “Theory from the Trenches,” about peasants in Pakistan who became revolutionary anticolonial actors and theorists.

Gyan Prakash

Dayton-Stockton Professor of History

Department of History, Princeton University

Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, where he specializes in the history of modern India. His research and teaching focus on urban modernity, the colonial genealogies of modernity, and problems of postcolonial thought and politics. His book Mumbai Fables, an edited volume, Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, and a co-edited volume, Utopia/Dystopia: Historical Conditions of Possibility were published by Princeton University Press in fall 2010. The Tower of Silence, a book based on a 1927 detective novel manuscript that he discovered and edited, was published in 2013. Mumbai Fables has been adapted for a film, Bombay Velvet, for which he wrote the original story and co-wrote the screenplay. His most recent book is Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy's Turning Point.