Dr. Asha Varadharajan

varadhar@queensu.ca
613 533 6000 extension 74420
Watson 433

“One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly." - T. W. Adorno

Biographical Assemblage

“Asha’s insistence on explaining the inspiration or the impact of a particular theory as well as her own irreverent reactions to the works invigorated my own understanding and memory of them." - Ruth Emode, undergraduate student

Refract

Profile

Curriculum Vitae  |  Key Publications  |  CV Highlights

An Overview of What's to Be Undone

I am by turns (post)colonial, migrant-settler, Canadian citizen, liberal-bourgeois, educated elite, radical pedagogue, conservative and erudite scholar, racialized, heterosexual, feminist, pop culture aficionado, anti-whatever. I am, in short, all of these things and none of them except when they trip me up or presume to name and categorize. I want to avoid an empty self-positioning that merely ensures rather than challenges business as usual or that remains sentimental rather than sceptical. Such fluidity and self-invention may well be a function of privilege but merely acknowledging that to be the case isn’t going to improve matters either.

Nominated for the W.J. Barnes Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Expertise

cosmopolitanism

syncretism

creolization

modernity

development

migration

human rights

religion and secularism

Enlightenment against Empire

orientalism

subalternity

Frankfurt School

critical Marxism

race

gender and sexuality studies

Passions and
Curiosities

Cultural
Heroes

Hot off the press

"Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me”: Rethinking the Humanities in (Times of) Crisis" with Jeremy De Chavez in Special Issue of Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies. 2019.

"'Straight from the Heart': A Pedagogy for the Vanquished of History" in Decolonisation and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning. Routledge, 2018.

"'ideas with broken wings': Critical Theory and postcolonial theory" in The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Sage Publishing, 2018.

"'How to Kick Ass when Life’s a Bitch': A Human Rights Bulletin from India." The Social Work of Narrative: Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary. ibidem-Verlag/Columbia University Press, 2018.


See the whole shebang

An Overview of What's to Be Undone

I am by turns (post)colonial, migrant-settler, Canadian citizen, liberal-bourgeois, educated elite, radical pedagogue, conservative and erudite scholar, racialized, heterosexual, feminist, pop culture aficionado, anti-whatever. I am, in short, all of these things and none of them except when they trip me up or presume to name and categorize. I want to avoid an empty self-positioning that merely ensures rather than challenges business as usual or that remains sentimental rather than sceptical. Such fluidity and self-invention may well be a function of privilege but merely acknowledging that to be the case isn’t going to improve matters either.

I am a Nominee for the W.J. Barnes Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Brimful of Asha: words that shape, express, inspire

ambiguity, irony, “heresy of paraphrase", ambivalence, enchantment, deracination, curiosity, surprise, speculation, rigour, defamiliarization, overdetermination, erudition, anomaly, aporia, incongruity, irreverence, intellectual retro-chic

Expertise

cosmopolitanism

syncretism

creolization

modernity

development

migration

human rights

religion and secularism

Enlightenment against Empire

orientalism

subalternity

Frankfurt School

critical Marxism

race

gender and sexuality studies

Hot off the press

"Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me”: Rethinking the Humanities in (Times of) Crisis" with Jeremy De Chavez in Special Issue of Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies. 2019.

"'Straight from the Heart': A Pedagogy for the Vanquished of History" in Decolonisation and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning. Routledge, 2018.

"'ideas with broken wings': Critical Theory and postcolonial theory" in The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Sage Publishing, 2018.

"'How to Kick Ass when Life’s a Bitch': A Human Rights Bulletin from India." The Social Work of Narrative: Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary. ibidem-Verlag/Columbia University Press, 2018.


See the whole shebang

Supervision

Statement on Supervision

My sustained attention to scholarly self-fashioning rather than merely to the dissertation's race to the finish line has played no small part in the remarkable success of my graduate students and post-doctoral supervisees.

  • Several graduate students I have worked with have been nominated for the A.C. Hamilton Prize and have had their dissertations published as well-regarded monographs.
  • Almost all the students and postdoctoral fellows hold tenure-track positions or are otherwise gainfully employed in academic and non-academic jobs.
  • One won the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship.
  • I have supervised 16 doctoral candidates, 2 Master’s students, 4 postdoctoral fellows, and 3 Honors research students.

Past Areas

Doctoral
  • postcolonial studies broadly speaking with writing from Africa, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, and Australia
  • diasporic and travel writing
  • American: 19thC, modernism, postmodern and contemporary, post 9/11
  • Canadian: "Africadian" Literatures
  • British: post-Thatcher contemporary fiction
  • Literary and Cultural Theory

Post-doctoral: Grey Owl, Imperial Boyhood, Arab Novel in English, Fetishism in Contemporary American fiction

Undergraduate and Master's: South African, Canadian, and Cambodian writing

Themes

cosmopolitanism — creolization — mourning and melancholia — "tripping" — love, nostalgia, and affect — nation and narration — crowds and processions — hardboiled detective fiction — the discourse of mental health — agape and emancipation — authorship in the age of terror — cynicism and modernity — the travails of whiteness

“Working with Asha is like being in a Charles Olson poem. She is “a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge.” She does not abide conventional logical paths, and learning from her is more like venturing into an open field than following a map. One does not “receive guidance” but rather is encouraged to constellate—to put into conversation, to restring, often to redefine. It’s a heady experience–sometimes baffling, sometimes humbling, always exhilarating."

– Dr. Lindsey Banco, doctoral supervisee

“I seldom remember first day of class exercises, but it has been seven years since I first entered Asha Varadharajan’s postcolonial theory seminar, and over the years I have thought of that first day often. We responded to the text of “Strange Fruit” — I found the piece extraordinarily difficult, so I wrote about feeling unable to fully analyze the song’s text. I would return to recordings of it (Billie Holiday’s is my favourite) and think about the intellectual and ethical imperatives of scholarly analysis. Somewhere along the way, a poem emerged about it. But it is the process that Asha made so much space for that has stayed with me. Her class was an invitation to sit with the difficult — theory, literature, history, writing — and spend time, to make a companion of it.."

– Anna Thomas, undergraduate student

Courses

Recent

Engl 883: Black Lives Matter: African American Culture and Politics

Engl 865: The Refugee Crisis: Migration, Human Rights, Citizenship

Engl 817: Publishing Practicum

Engl 876: Postcolonialism: "Hopes and Impediments"

Engl 290-003: "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue": Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Engl 476: Terra Australis: An Introduction to Australian Literature and Culture

Engl 223: Selected Women Writers Post-1900

Curricular development

“The Souls of Black Folk": African American Literature and Culture

Selected Women Writers Post-1900

The Bard is Still with Us: The Cultural Hegemony of the Plays of William Shakespeare