Mrinalini Greedharry
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History
- Blog
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- Member for
- 2 years 4 weeks
My Profile
- Title
- Dr.
- Occupation
- Assistant Professor
- Discipline(s)
- English, Postcolonial Theory and Literature
- University
- Laurentian University
- Department
- English Department
- Country
- Canada
- Town / City
- Sudbury
- Previous Universities
- University of Helsinki/Renvall Institute, University of London (Goldsmiths), University of Victoria, University of Saskatchewan
- RESEARCH INTERESTS
- postcolonial, historiography, critical race studies, literary pedagogy, Foucault, philsophy of literature, philosophy as literature
Research
- Member for
- 2 years 4 weeks
My research career began in the field of postcolonial theory and I wrote my phd under the supervision of Bart Moore-Gilbert.
Since graduating from the University of London (Goldsmiths) I have published a book based on my doctoral research, entitled Postcolonial Theory and Psychoanalysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). The book is the foundation of what I hope will be a long-term project. My interest in postcolonial theory is not so much the result of an interest in postcolonial literatures (though I am a literature scholar by training), but a profound interest in the history of specific colonial practices. The book examines the trajectory of thinking about colonialism that relies heavily on psychoanalytic assumptions and theories, something I found deeply troubling from my days as an undergraduate. In the book I suggest that we need to take a look at psychoanalysis itself as a colonial discourse. One of my future research projects, then, concerns this history. I want to know how certain subjects (non-Western, colonized) became psychoanalysable after a history of being considered beyond the scope of psychoanalysis.
As a result of my teaching I am also particularly interested in the ways that literature has become, more generally, understood in overwhelmingly psychological and psychoanalytic terms. It is my hypothesis that this 'psy' bias in literature actually inhibits genuinely postcolonial literatures and I would like to do more research on this. Because of my own predisposition towards historical methods and to an interest in colonial histories, I aim to write about the ways that the historical thread of postcolonial theory/studies might work as an antidote to the psychological.