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Research and Teaching Interests Postcolonial modernity and development -- power, subjectivity, and ethics of selfhood -- the making of nature, space, and landscape -- problems of imagination, affect, and mise-en-scene in cinema -- deep genealogies and transverse flows in the history of the present -- South Asia Ongoing Projects I am currently at work on three manuscript projects. The first, Crooked Stalks: On the Virtues of Development in South India (forthcoming, Duke University Press), concerns the moral and ethical stakes of development in postcolonial India. Focusing on the historical subjection and contemporary condition of a caste deemed "thievish" by nature in the Tamil country of southern India, I chart the political forces and practices of virtue lending shape and depth to an interior topography of selfhood. The kernel of this project is cultivation, taken as both a labor on the land and an ethical task: a struggle with the imagined nature of the heart as well as the material nature of the soil. Partly building on the concerns of this monograph, I am working with historian Daud Ali (School of Oriental and African Studies) to produce an edited volume on the subject of ethical practices of selfhood in South Asia. Collaborating with other anthropologists, historians, and scholars of religion and philosophy, we seek to explore the diversity of South Asian textual, historical, and quotidian answers to the question of how one ought to live in a moral sense. The volume will address ethics in relation to diverse lineages of moral tradition, the formation of ethical subjects, challenges of modernity, and the politics of the everyday. A third project now underway concerns imaginations of locality, practices of cinematic setting, and the production of affect in the Tamil-language commercial cinema of south India. Building on the notion of "landscapes of affect" developed in Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference (with Donald Moore and Jake Kosek), I focus on the use of landscape and mise-en-scene as means of provoking the affects and desires of contemporary Tamil film audiences. The project relies upon a transnational ethnography of cinematic production practices, working "on location" with film crews both within and beyond India. Representative Publications
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