Critical Encounters

Critical Encounters is a forum of critical reflection on political and cultural practices – a modest attempt at putting together interesting new perspectives, on a range of contemporary issues, from the global south, especially from India and South Asia. We aim at an engagement with important questions of our times, through a continuous dialogue across different intellectual traditions and attempts at the theorization of the historical specificities of different experiences. The contributions here are more like conversations rather than finished products, aiming at provoking exchanges and debates that may take us beyond the standard fare provided by political and social theory or philosophy.

Critical Encounters believes 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 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 restless search for new languages is on. These languages, we believe, must emerge through critical intellectual encounters between different traditions – Eastern/ Southern and Western/Northern; Indic, Arabic, Persian, Chinese and African. The turn of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century pose questions that reveal the limits of our theoretical frames and 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 – but one that demands that our practice of theorizing be situated rather than ‘transcendental’, so to speak.