Aishwarya Suresh Khale
Aishwarya’s research project offers a deconstructive interrogation of postcolonial identity formation in India by critically examining how the enduring legacies of imperialism are expressed in spatial-corporeal articulations within liminal spaces and their cartographic imagination. Situated at the intersection of postcolonial theory and memory studies, the thesis explores how bodies are constituted, disciplined, and remembered within a matrix of historical trauma, socio-political violence, and embodied resistance. The project foregrounds corporeality not merely as a site of suffering or passivity but as a deeply political domain through which identity is contested and reimagined. Through this lens, the research examines the embodied experiences in relation to food production, land dispossession, among the politics of sex, intimacy, and desire within the system. Memory is not treated as a disembodied repository of the past but as an embodied practice, where trauma is not only remembered cognitively but lived somatically. Drawing from theories of Michael Rothberg, Gayatri Spivak, Homi K Bhabha and Jacques Derrida, this research seeks to propose a new framework for understanding how identities are continually reconstituted through the body. The research positions corporeality not merely as a biological given, but as a historically contingent and politically overdetermined site where memory, trauma, and identity converge. It is through the suffering, remembering, and desiring that the postcolonial subject negotiates their fractured place in the nation, and it is through the ethics of embodiment that a decolonial identity may be imagined.
Titel des Promotionsvorhabens
Corporeal Cartographies: A Deconstructive Inquiry into the Indian Postcolonial Body and Its Identity, Desire, and Embodied Memory (working title)
Forschungsschwerpunkte
Postcolonial Literature, Comparative Literature, World Literatures, Comparative Imperialisms, Revisionist perspective
