On Theory and the South with Saronik Bosu: Borderlines meets the High Theory Podcast
ANTARA CHAKRABARTI AND OLGA VERLATO
Art by Saronik Bosu
High Theory is a short podcast, run by Kim Adams and Saronik Bosu, that asks simple questions about difficult ideas from the academy.
Antara Chakrabarti and Olga Verlato, two of our contributing editors for South Asia and Middle East, spoke with Saronik Bosu in a crossover episode with the High Theory podcast titled “Theory from the South.” We talked about our work at Borderlines, what ‘theory from the South’ means to us, High Theory’s origin story, and Saronik’s relationship with theory-making as a process. Read an excerpt from our conversation here, and listen to the full episode on High Theory.
Saronik: Let me ask you my first question: what the heck is “Theory from the South”?
Olga: This is a very broad term which holds a kind of tension within. On the one hand, there is the risk of essentializing the “south,” a critique that has been made by several scholars over the past decades. On the other hand, we find that some of the most cutting edge and thoughtful conversations have emerged precisely by engaging and thinking with theory from the south and South-South connections. One of these interesting debates is the question of universalizing versus historicism. In Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty notes that one can engage enthusiastically with Marx or Hegel without having to justify their choice of doing so or historicizing their thought within the specific time period and place in which it was produced. Yet this does not happen to the same extent with theorists or intellectuals from other regions of the world. Omnia El Shakry recently engaged with this question and spoke of the possibility for reading creatively and enthusiastically with a theorist “in the now” as a freeing move. As a historian, it is particularly thought-provoking to reflect on what can happen once we detach a theory from its specific geographic and historical context to see the kind of work it can do across different regions and times.
Antara: I feel like we all came across the term “the South” from different disciplines and in different ways. The first time I encountered this term was in development theory, because I was a development studies student. It is very interesting to see how the term started gaining a lot of importance, but also had the potential to become very all-encompassing. This is something that we keep having to figure out as we write about “theory from the south” - what is it about the category that makes it so useful? - and to move away from the Western Anglophone canon as the driver of theory. And also to move away from certain ideas of linear temporalities and progressivist notions, which is where it all started. The term South was made useful to push back against these very notions that the North is more progressive. But then you start seeing a lot of the conversations, under this umbrella of South-South, also becoming quite flat in terms of power relations. So we also feel the urge to remind ourselves that we also need to bring those differences that are ‘within’, to the forefront, without essentializing them at the same time.
Saronik, what is High Theory, and what is its origin story?
Saronik: Our origin story is in many ways very commonplace in the sense that because of the pandemic, there was an efflorescence of podcasts all around, and we definitely belong to that group. My co-host Kim Adams and I share an office at NYU, and we spent a long time in wildly associative conversations when we should have been working. When the pandemic happened, and we went into lockdown in march 2020, we realized that we really missed our conversations. High Theory was thus born out of the need to keep talking to each other, and to recover Critical Theory, cultural criticism, and ideas that can't be slotted into either of these categories. To celebrate the associative, the digressive, and the tangential. We try to do this in 15 minutes, our episodes are very short. It’s been a year now, our anniversary is in the first week of August. We did not believe that we would last this long!
My next question is: how do we use Theory from the South?
Antara: We wanted to use theory from the South to start complicating the many ways in which we often go about dealing with theory, and it's always this process of trying to figure this thing out about what is the South as not a fixed place but as relations, which is very complicated and hard to talk about, but also still very important to do that. And let that complexity just be.
Olga: There are various examples of what theorizing from the south means, and the kind of impact it can have. Our editor to the Middle East, Simon Conrad, recently spoke with Doctors Giordani and Safieddine, who translated and published Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings by Mahdi Amel, an Arab Marxist thinker and Lebanese Communist Party member. Amel is lesser-known internationally than other Arab Marxist thinkers who published extensively in French and English. This translation project thus makes Amel’s work available for an English speaking audience, starting with our syllabi, and potentially beyond that. Notably, it does so by treating Amel’s thought as its own body of scholarship and taking it in all its complexity, without seeing it merely as a “case study” of Marxist thought from the Arab world. The issue at stake here and more broadly is, in turn, that of where theory has traditionally come from, meaning the North American and Western European tradition, with other regions often being used just as a case study or a source of primary sources and information. Alternatively, this act of recentering allows us to take a thinker or a theory and make it core to how we think.
Antara: Yeah and theory from the south also allows us to have the scholarship from different regions and disciplines and Borderlines also lets them kind of sit alongside each other. And you find these myriad connections crop up which you wouldn't have otherwise, which is always really fun to see afterwards.
Olga: Let us ask you our second question. Since your podcast is called High Theory, we were curious about what’s the high of theory all about.
Saronik: Doing theory is in a way an activity of deeper rationality. It's boldly associative thinking, and it’s this kind of boldness that gives you that thrill. We see theory as something that the mind does at a particular time rather than something that a particular set of people do. That's something that was essential for us when we started High Theory, to do away with centers of gatekeeping exclusion.
Finally, let me ask you: how will “Theory from the South” save the world?
Olga: I won’t try to give a definitive answer. Still, if we are thinking in terms of impact, it can be useful to reflect on the kind of system in which we operate when it comes to recognition, visibility, and funding, and the kind of intellectual production that gets prioritized. For example, Dr. Giordani noted the different degree of professional recognition given to publishing a “traditional” historical monograph compared to a translation project. Looking at concrete issues of impact such as this can help us be more thoughtful when it comes to researching, designing sillabi and bibliographies, and, most crucially, our own practice.
Antara: It’s also like a pedagogical tool that “theory from the south” becomes. Sohini was also talking about it to both Olga and me, that there was this tendency to see the syllabi in our classes be overpopulated by recent historians and anthropologists within the US and Europe. We wanted to see scholars from these other regions and also scholars from other regions who are not as established as well so younger scholars would hardly reach the syllabus. Sohini mentioned how this was also a way to start interviewing them, and make Borderlines a pedagogical tool and let these discussions enter the syllabi.
So Saronik, what does working on a podcast as a part of theory-making feel like in terms of a method?
Saronik: Yeah, it's interesting because Olga was talking about the kind of illegibility of this kind of work in tenure track documents and right now, I am amassing my job materials, and I am thinking very much about how to represent the podcast, whether it is legible or visible at all. But this is also a question that we will be pondering. This fall, October 15 and 16th High Theory and a couple of other like-minded podcasts have formed this group called the Humanities Podcast Network. And we are organizing the inaugural humanities podcasting symposium. We have more than one roundtable on this very topic - what does it mean to do a podcast as scholarship, can it be theory, what does it mean to produce knowledge in this form? But before I talk about High Theory specifically, my personal journey starts a little bit early, because as an undergraduate student myself I was really scared of theory, with the capital T. There should be this kind of “Introduction to Theory” books like Peter Barry, and I actually tried to find the book and I have this paragraph. So this is from the introduction of Peter Barry’s “Beginning Theory” - “The simple answer is that after the moment of theory there comes, inevitably, the 'hour' of theory, when it ceases to be the exclusive concern of a dedicated minority and enters the intellectual bloodstream as a taken-for-granted aspect of the curriculum. At this stage the glamour fades, the charisma is 'routinized', and it becomes the day-to-day business of quite a large number of people to learn or teach (or both) this material. There are evident dangers of over-simplifying things and so offering a false reassurance to students facing the difficulties of this topic for the first time. All the same, the main responsibility of anyone attempting a book like this one is to meet the demand for clear explanation and demonstration.”
What really strikes me is that despite this kind of manifesto, I didn't feel welcome at any point during my undergraduate studies by this misty, nebulous, unreachable formation that theory was. Although things got easier during my M.A. and Ph.D. that discomfort stayed with me. I really wanted to understand what that feeling meant and its class connotations. For years I kept thinking: who has the kind of socio-intellectual clout, or position to feel comfortable about theory? This is what we wanted to do with High Theory: to try and break the exclusionary, gatekeeping nature of “doing theory.” We heard of High Theory being used in some classrooms, and I have taught with podcasts as well. That's the highlight of theory-making as a podcaster: to break up certain kinds of monoliths and to make theory a more easily transposable and transmissible digital thing.
Antara: There is something so valuable in something like a podcast or a magazine having a very similar sensibility in terms of accessibility, and also to let people absorb them and sit with them and take some time with them.
Saronik: Theory tends to become more opaque with each user. Until, at some point, you start using it without actually understanding it just to feel included in the conversation. This is a kind of an accumulative effect of exclusion, which is not great.
Olga: I wouldn’t be surprised if the kind of work you are doing with this podcast was going to become more and more common, also given what you said about technology, time, and how we acquire knowledge and information.
Kim Adams is a postdoctoral fellow in Public Humanities at Stanford University. She completed her PhD in English at New York University in 2019. Her book project, Building the Body Electric, argues that electric medicine worked to form American bodies into raced and gendered subjects from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era. She is committed to theoretical scholarship that uses material history to evoke practical consequences.
Saronik Bosu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English, New York University. He is writing a dissertation on literature and economic thought in India. He also works in the fields of medical and environmental humanities. He has been published in journals such as Interventions and Movable Type, and volumes such as The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature.