Ithaca College

Naeem Inayatullah publishes a chapter (with David Blaney) titled, “Non-Player Dialectics” in  Ashis Nandy: A Life in Dissent, (eds) Ramin Jahanbegloo and Ananya Vajpeyi (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 197-208.

Abstract and links below:

Abstract:

We show how Ashis Nandy, one of the foremost social thinkers of our time, might be seen as a theorist of International Relations (IR).  Specifically, we demonstrate what aspects of Nandy’s writing and thinking became the foundation of our own work and how he has influenced other scholars within IR. 

We see Nandy as practicing a form of dialectics on behalf of Modernity’s others who have been relegated to the hinterlands of the modern.  This aspect of Nandy’s thought has led some to emphasize his “critical traditionalism,” but we see his critical stance located within the modern as well, since Modernity’s others are always also within. 

Nandy makes clear that the modern serves as a challenge to ossified traditions as much as traditions can be mobilized to undercut modern thought’s pretensions to completeness and universality.  These insights grow out of Nandy’s understanding that colonialism produces both the colonized and colonizers as victims, a co-suffering that makes the other a source of critical reflection and opens us up to the possibility of a softer and more democratic self. 

Following Nandy, we might see international relations as cultural encounters that remain colonial, but also offer the possibility for critical self-reflection to envision and fight for forms of society and political life beyond the oppressions of colonialism.

Links:

https://faculty.ithaca.edu/naeem/docs/Papers/Nandy_Chapter/

https://india.oup.com/product/ashis-nandy-9780199483945?