Venkat Rao: De-Signing Mnemaps, Configuring Cultures of Memory in the Digital Conjuncture

CESTA Special Seminar
On January 22nd, 2025, Professor Rao delved into the idea of cultures of memory that sustain themselves through their unique formations, even amidst the rise of surrogate inscriptional systems. A mnemap concerns the figuration of mnemocultures. Mnemocultures are cultures of memory that sustain(ed) themselves primarily by putting to work their endowed formations even in the context of the ascendant surrogate inscriptional formations. Mnemocultures generate and disseminate “lively archives”. A Mnemap is an assemblage of cultural clusters and constellations. The proposed Mnemap assembles seven open-ended constellations. Each constellation in turn is composed of countless formations of clusters. Each such cluster in turn is composed of infinite “units” that emerge, disperse, and disappear to re-emerge endlessly. Such units (biocultural formations) are called Jatis (in Sanskrit). The generative and dispersive impulse of the assemblage cannot be confined to the contours of the map, and it cannot be signed and owned. “Culture” and territory are not necessarily in isomorphic in relation.
Given that the university of the humanities itself can be seen as an assemblage of shifting and heterogeneous multiplicity of units, teaching and research touched by the impulse of the critical can see the university itself as a distinctive space for an unforeseen interface: (i) For responsively receiving and responding to the implanted heritage of the humanities (of Europe/West) from the muted ends of its reception. (ii) Configuring the non-totalizable mnemocultural inheritances of the receiving ends of the university. This presentation shares some thoughts and experiments concerning the possibilities of figuring such a trans-formative Mnemap of critical (from) humanities elsewhere.
About the Speaker
D. Venkat Rao teaches at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. His areas of interest include literary and cultural studies, image studies, epic traditions, visual cultures, comparative thought, translation, and mnemocultures.
Rao studied at the Kakatiya University, Warangal, and the University of Kent at Canterbury. He did postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington, Seattle. He has taught at various universities in India and at the University of Washington. In addition to books in English and Telugu, he has published several articles in national and international journals. Rao's recent work includes India, Europe and the Question of Cultural Difference (Routledge, 2021); Performative Reflections of Indian Traditions: Towards a Liveable Learning (Springer, 2021); and Critical Humanities from India: Contexts, Issues, Futures (Routledge, 2018). Other publications include Cultures of Memory in South Asia (Springer, 2014), and In Citations: Readings in Area Studies of Culture (1999), a translation of Ashis Nandy’s Intimate Enemy into Telugu (2005). Earlier he translated into English a Telugu intellectual autobiography called The Last Brahmin (2007, 2012, 2017). He has a full-length work on literary-cultural criticism in Telugu entitled Saamskritika Chaanakyaalu (2005). He is the editor of the Routledge book series on Critical Humanities Across Cultures.