10 – 11th June 2019: Empire and the Senses

Human and non-human bodies have always been immersed in a sensory world of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations. In the long twentieth century, these have been enmeshed with power by enacting hierarchies of the senses themselves (sight being the most superior followed by sound, smell, taste and so on) which in turn were used (i) to perform distinction across race, caste, class and gender hierarchies (black and brown/Dalit/working-class/menstruating women’s bodies have often been described as “dirty”, “smelly”, “noisy”) and (ii) structure technologies (such as audio and video media (gramophone, cinema, radio etcetera)). Read more