Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Prasenjit Duara, Asia Research Institute, NUS

ABSTRACT

This talk charts out a series of histories of the now ubiquitous plastic carrier bag. From an initial career of plastics as consumer delight, to the more recent iteration of plastics as crisis, this talk asks: what all might the plastic bag carry in contemporary urban India? I answer through an admittedly ‘pirate’ reading of Lara Marks’ book, The Skin of the Film (2000). I use this book as an entry point for a (corollary pirate) analysis of the haptics of plastics in India. That is to say, this talk explores how the sensory experience presented by the materiality of various objects—such as the experience of handling a plastic carrier bag—both produces and signifies destabilizing excesses of meaning. In this talk I am particularly concerned with how we might raise questions about how plastics in general—and plastic carry bags in particular—come to be imbricated in the everyday performance of urban life. In short, I attempt to trace how the plastic bag came to serve as a powerful marker of caste and untouchability in otherwise ‘caste-blind’ spaces of urban middle class life.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sarah Hodges is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick, UK. She works on the social and cultural history of Tamil-speaking south India. She is currently completing a book about the economic afterlives of used, discarded medical objects, titled: Throwaway Medicine: The Material Afterlives of Healthcare in India and Elsewhere. In addition to this, she is author of Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce: Birth Control in South India, 1920-1940 (2008) and editor of Reproductive Health in India: Politics, Histories, Controversy (2006). Along with Mohan Rao, she has recently edited a collection of essays: Stem Cells, Surrogates and other Strategic Bodies: Public Health, Private Wealth and the Problem of Poverty in Modern India (forthcoming).

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg