Critical Encounters

Critical Encounters is a forum of critical theoretical reflection on political and cultural practices. It is a modest attempt at putting together interesting new perspectives, on a range of contemporary issues, from the vantage point of the global south, especially from India and South Asia. The contributions here aim at an engagement with important questions of our times, through a continuous, ongoing dialogue with the historical specificities of different experiences. They are conversations rather than finished products, for, we aim to become a forum of exchanges that will stimulate a more sustained scholarship over time.

Critical Encounters believes that any reconstruction and refashioning of social and political theory must be predicated upon, among other things a serious engagement with different traditions of thought and intellection in different parts of the world.
We believe that we are living in times that are catastrophic and exhilarating at the same time.  The twentieth century turned out to be a century of exceptional violence – and there seems no respite from its legacy in the twenty first as well. We also face an acute ecological crisis, where the survival of the planet itself is at stake. And yet, these are exciting times – times when old hegemonies have collapsed and a search for new languages is on. These languages, we believe, must emerge through critical intellectual encounters between different traditions – Eastern/ Southern and Western/Northern. The second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century pose questions that call for an engagement across traditions and cultures; across the diverse trajectories and experiences of modernity and secularism. We believe we might be living in a period immense intellectual creativity that can only emerge in the course of critical dialogues between the East and the West, South and North.

The image on the header: Courtesy Raqs Media Collective