English Department Faculty

Milind Wakankar

Assistant Professor. Ph.D. Columbia University 2002; English and Comparative Literature; Postcolonial theory.

2068 Humanities; T Th 5:10-6:40
(631) 632-7334
milind.wakankar@stonybrook.edu

Courses:

Fall 2008

Literary Analysis and Argumentation (EGL 204) TTh 3:50-5:10
The South Asian Novel in English (EGL 396) TTh 2:20-3:40

Selected Publications

"The Anomaly of Kabir: Culture and Canonicity in Indian Modernity." Subaltern Studies XIII (Summer, 2002).
"The Moment of Criticism in Nationalist Thought: Ramchandra Shukla and the Poetics of Responsibility." South Atlantic Quarterly 2.2 (Summer, 2002).
"Body, Crowd, Identity: Genealogy of a Hindu Nationalist Ascetics." Social Text 14:4 (Winter, 1995) 45-74.

Milind Wakankar has a BA from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi and an MA and MPhil from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. His doctoral work was conducted at Columbia University. His completed manuscript, entitled ‘Miracle and Violence,’ is a philosophical and literary critical attempt to understand the relation between mainstream and marginal or subaltern religious practice in the Indian subcontinent. Wakankar’s current project focuses on imaginings of interiority (in Indian and Jewish mysticism, and in Sufism, with scholarship on Milton and Blake, and on Spinoza and Marx, as a perennial counterpoint) as a ‘state’ counterposed to the idea of historicity implicit in the modern nation-state. Here the line of inquiry will depart from current debates informed by the work of Heidegger, Benjamin, Levinas and Rosenzweig, toward an engagement with the problem of myth, the daemonic aspect of tragic character in relation to the political, and the ‘mistaken’ trajectory of postcolonial psychology/psychoanalysis in its adumbration, in the era of modernism, of indigenous concepts of mood and affect taken from ancient Indic cosmology.