Dr. Inderpal Grewal
We were honored to have Inderpal Grewal, professor and chair in the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, join us on Tuesday March 13th to present the lecture “Commodifying aerial visuality in neoliberal empire.” Grewal is an influential feminist scholar who helped found the field of transnational feminist cultural studies, and the author of several books, most recently Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First century America (Duke University Press, 2017).
Dr. Grewal’s talk examined Hari Kunzru’s short story “Drone” to discuss how dystopian fiction written from a postcolonial and diasporic context imagines the production of inequality and labor in global capitalism. Kunzru’s concerns about drones consider gender, sexuality, race and eugenics as necessary elements of this new visuality, one that requires both the commodification of drones and the use of abjected labor to create commodities.
Grewal’s ongoing projects include essays on gender, violence and counterinsurgency in India, and a book project on masculinity and bureaucracy in postcolonial India.