SelectedWorks - Gautam Basu Thakur

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Selected Works of Gautam Basu Thakur

Department Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies

Dr. Gautam Basu Thakur holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined the faculty of the Department of English at Boise State University in 2011, and is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies. His research interests include Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, Victorian literature and culture, British literature of the Empire, and film and popular culture. Basu Thakur was Idaho Humanities Council Research Fellow in 2013-14.

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About Gautam Basu Thakur

Dr. Gautam Basu Thakur holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined the faculty of the Department of English at Boise State University in 2011, and is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies. His research interests include Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, Victorian literature and culture, British literature of the Empire, and film and popular culture. Basu Thakur was Idaho Humanities Council Research Fellow in 2013-14.

Journal Articles (6)

“You Should Pray I Choose the Latter”: Rioting, Violence, & Jouissance (Gautam Basu Thakur) PsyArt (2022)

In the climactic scene from the film The Great Debaters (2007), James L. Framer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), speaking for the motion “Resolved: Civil Disobedience is a Moral weapon in the fight for Justice,” rebuts the ...

Vernacular Objects | Indian Mutiny | Imperial Panic1 (Gautam Basu Thakur) Victorian Literature and Culture (2016)

This paper is a study of subject-object relations in British writings about the Indian Uprising of 1857. I focus in particular on accounts vocalizing panic over a colony of objects “baldly encountered” and “not quite ...

Necroecology: Undead, Dead, and Dying on the Limits of the Colony (Gautam Basu Thakur) Victorian Studies (2016)

This paper introduces and explicates the neologism “necroecology” as a critical, philosophical approach for studying human-nonhuman relations in the context of British colonialism and its aftermath. Necroecology also names an aesthetic that originated in the ...

The Menon-Žižek Debate: “The Tale of the (Never-marked) (But secretly coded) Universal and the (Always marked) Particular . . .” (Gautam Basu Thakur) Slavic Review (2013)

On occasion of his first lecture tour of India in 2010, Žižek sparked off a debate with Nivedita Menon, a leading postcolonial feminist scholar. The debate revolves around Menon's contention that Žižek's emphasis on European, ...

Of Suture and Signifier in Michael Haneke's Caché (2005) (Gautam Basu Thakur) Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2008)

The paper studies Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's most recent film, Caché (2005), as a narrative exploration of cultural tension, anxiety, and social psychology in the post-9/11 world. The paper focuses specifically on this psychological text/context ...

Re-reading Michael Haneke's La Pianiste: Schizo-Politics and the Critique of Consumer Culture (Gautam Basu Thakur) New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film (2007)

The paper argues that Michael Haneke's La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (2001) has not departed from the critique of consumerist culture that his Austrian films represent, neither has Haneke devolved into individualist melodrama following his relocation ...

Postcolonial Lack: Identity, Culture, Surplus (Gautam Basu Thakur) Faculty & Staff Authored Books (2020)

Examines representations of surplus enjoyment in postcolonial literature and film to focus on self-other relations rather than difference. Postcolonial Lack reconvenes dialogue between Lacanian psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory in order to expand the range of ...

Reading Lacan's Seminar VIII: Transference (Gautam Basu Thakur and Jonathan Dickstein) Faculty & Staff Authored Books (2020)

This book provides 18 lively commentaries on Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference (1960-61) that explore its theoretical and philosophical consequences in the clinic, the classroom, and society. Including contributions from clinicians as well as scholars working ...

Lacan and the Nonhuman (Gautam Basu Thakur and Jonathan Michael Dickstein) Faculty & Staff Authored Books (2018)

This book initiates the discussion between psychoanalysis and recent humanist and social scientific interest in a fundamental contemporary topic – the nonhuman. The authors question where we situate the subject (as distinct from the human) ...

Postcolonial Theory and Avatar (Gautam Basu Thakur) Faculty & Staff Authored Books (2016)

Braiding together a discussion of reviving postcolonial studies with a critical interrogation of James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar, this book offers a concise introduction to postcolonial theory, focusing in particular on issues of representation, discourse, ...

Fanon’s "Zone of Nonbeing": Blackness and the Politics of the Real (Gautam Basu Thakur) Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory (2021)

This chapter reconvenes dialogue between Fanon and Lacanian theory in order to analyze Fanon’s study of colonialism and racism in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Specifically, my aim here is to read Fanon against the ...

"A Strangeness Beyond Reckoning": The Animal as Surplus in Postcolonial Literature (Gautam Basu Thakur) Postcolonial Animalities (2020)

In their 2010 book Postcolonial Ecocriticism, widely recognized as a founding contribution in the subfield of postcolonial zoocriticism, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin posit: "if the wrongs of colonialsim—its legacies of continuing human inequalities, for ...

Beyond Reason: The Subject of Desire and Enjoyment in Populism (Gautam Basu Thakur and Meghant Sudan) Populism and Its Limits: After Articulation (2020)

'Populism' is defined, debated, and contested at multiple levels. Without entering the complexities involved in trying to define the term, this chapter takes as its point of departure the ideational approach staked by Muddle and ...

Mind the Gap: Commentary on Session XXV (Gautam Basu Thakur) Reading Lacan's Seminar VII: Transference (2020)

Using the absent beginning of the session as shorthand this commentary seeks to explore the pedagogical possibility of this textual lack for understanding Lacan’s explication of the relation between anxiety and desire.

Introduction to A Subaltern-Rebel Document: 'Advice of the Royal Army' (Gautam Basu Thakur) Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857: Volume 7: Documents of the Indian Uprising (2017)

Originally in Urdu and later translated into English, this document is a proclamation issued by the Royal or rebel army that challenged British rule in South Asia in 1857. Basu Thakur’s introduction highlights how alongside ...

Reading Bhabha, Reading Lacan: Preliminary Notes on Colonial Anxiety (Gautam Basu Thakur) The Literary Lacan from Literature to 'lituraterre' and Beyond (2013)

Configuring the Other: The Detective and the Real in Satyajit Ray's Chiriakhana (Gautam Basu Thakur) Figurations in Indian Film (2013)

Introduction: "I am within the work of the unconscious."1 In Satyajit Ray's 1967 film Chiriakhana (The Zoo), crime is solved through the detective's diagnostic apprehension of a linguistic quirk—a slip of tongue. Byomkesh Bakshi (Uttam ...

Globalization and the Cultural Imaginary: Constructions of Subjectivity, Freedom, & Enjoyment in Popular Indian Cinema (Gautam Basu Thakur) Bollywood and Globalization : Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora (2010)

Pedagogy of/at the Margins: Reflections on Teaching World Literature in the American West and the Deep South (Gautam Basu Thakur) Conference Proceedings of the First International Conference on Literature, Language and Communication: An Essential Trident (2015)

[No abstract available.]

Re-presenting Disability? Print Media and the Representation of Disability (Gautam Basu Thakur) (2006)

[No abstract available.]

The Nonhuman Turn. Edited by Richard Grusin (Gautam Basu Thakur) ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature & Environment (2016)

The Nonhuman Turn is a long due and welcome attempt at identifying, characterizing, and consolidating the varied recent approaches that examine the human in relation to the nonhuman. As Richard Grusin explains in the introduction and ...

Directory of World Cinema: India (Gautam Basu Thakur) Cercles: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone (2016)

Every discussion of “Indian” cinema that begins under the signature of Bollywood, makes me recoil in anticipation of what I over the years have come to expect from such discussions: a puerile and wholesale reduction ...

Sukanya Banerjee - Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Gautam Basu Thakur) Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (2013)

Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” (1835) set out a conditional invitation to the colonized: learn English to become British in taste and culture while remaining Indian by blood and color. The transfer of ...

John Plotz - Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Gautam Basu Thakur) Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (2009)

[No abstract available.]

Subalternity, Blackness & (the Crisis of) the Onto-Phenomenological (Gautam Basu Thakur) Psychology & the Other 2021 (2021)