Student profiles
Ayanava Banerjee
Email: Ayanava.Banerjee@liverpool.ac.uk
Thesis Title
Institution
Supervisors
Professor Deana Heath, Chair in Indian and Colonial History, Department of History, University of Liverpool
Professor Andy Davies, Reader in Human Geography, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool
Research Summary
In India growing authoritarianism has led to the expansion of carceral spaces, in addition to the unprecedented criminalisation of Muslims, the lower castes, and Adivasi, or tribal peoples. Activists for social justice, many of them Muslims, Christians and members of the lower castes, have also been criminalised, and often incarcerated for years without trial. Furthermore, large numbers of Muslims and lower-caste Hindus have, through means such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019), been declared non-citizens in their own country, with many of them incarcerated in detention centres—developments that the Indian middle classes, in particular, have widely supported.
Despite the urgency and severity of such problems, recent resistance movements, ranging from the global Black Lives Matter, defund the police and prison abolition movements, to the Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim Lives matter movements in India, have done little to undermine them. One reason for this is the lack of historical understanding of the ways in which the global carceral regime, which first began in the eighteenth century to control peoples resistant to colonisation, has been re-imagined and re-appropriated for nationalist ends. Focusing specifically on Bengal, the first region to be colonised in India and hence the first in which a project of colonial carcerality was elucidated and later exported (both regionally and globally), this interdisciplinary project will explore how support for carceral spaces historically been generated and perpetuated, particularly in authoritarian and non-democratic contexts like colonies; what the relationship is between resistance to carceral spaces and their proliferation; how colonial carceral spaces been appropriated and transformed into national spaces; and how such processes have enabled the ongoing marginalisation, and incarceration of peoples such as religious minorities and the lower castes and classes.
Research Interests
Social History; Incarceration; Theories of social space; carceral geography, Critical Social Theory; Nationalism; Imperialism and Colonialism.
Publications
coming soon