PUNCTUATED RENEWALS: RABINDRANATH TAGORE IN THE 21ST CENTURY 

 Special Issue of the JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT

Scheduled for publication in December 2011 

 Editor: Debashish Banerji, Ph.D.

Debashish Banerji is a professor of Indian Studies and the dean of academic affairs at the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles . He is also a research fellow in the department of Asian and Comparative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco , and adjunct faculty in Asian Art History at the Pasadena City College in Pasadena , California . He is the curator of a number of exhibitions of Asian art in the U.S. and India and the author of the book The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore (Sage, 2010).

 Request for Contributions:

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) needs little introduction to Indian or global readers of literature. Nobel awardee of 1913 for his poetry, Tagore has been celebrated in his native Bengal and in India as a larger than life icon whose songs make up the national anthems of two nations. A poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright, writer of dance dramas, song writer and composer, artist, nationalist, internationalist, educator and social thinker, Tagore's reputation in his time and in the 20th c has been richly deserved. But time leaves no man at rest, and public opinion on Tagore has grown more complex since his passing with both sharply critical voices seeking distance or a space of emergence from under his gigantic shadow, and the fossilization of adulatory phrases or images having stereotyped him into obsolescence. New national and global concerns have emerged since his lifetime and these seek for new solutions based on a context of thinking which has developed its new categories and constellations. One hundred and fifty years since his birth, does Tagore have any relevance to this postmodern and postcolonial discourse? Or does he belong merely to a moment in history, exalted by his hour into a prophet mouthing "guru English" in a humanist canon, fated to a fossilized relic in an archive of cultural rituals or a simulacrum in anachronistic identity politics? A contemporary recontextualization of Tagore within the international canon of critical modernism from the mid-19th to the mid-20th c. would attempt to recover the trajectories of relevance linking his historicity to our own. It may probe issues of national and modern subject formation and intersubjectivity or the ethics, aesthetics and politics of affect and eros wthin a matrix of colonial and postcolonial and/or modern and postmodern power. It may probe the nascent or well developed discourses of feminism, queer theory and/or subaltern theory in his expressions or assess his language use as a vehicle for the awkward hybrid dialog of colonialism and nationalism or of positivism, orientalism and other named and unnamed constructs in the ongoing process of what Heidegger has called "the Europeanization of the world." The trajectory of post-Enlightenment modernity in its present hour of neo-liberal globalization implies forms of individual and social being and becoming, hegemonies and resistances that may have their retrospective traces in the Tagorean text, as may the technological ubiquities, dystopic or heterotopic chronotopes and/or the overman-making projects with which Nietzsche proclaimed the death of god and Foucault the death of man as the inaugurating events of (post)modernity. Tagore's overabundant fertility and excess could have been spoken of in its own time in terms of concerns present to its theoretical corpus. But the unspoken and the unthought continue to haunt his text and our aim in this volume is to open a space for the living power of his critique and his creative innovations to fertilize our present engagements through theoretical visibility. We solicit essays which may fulfill the role of such interventions. Essays should be 4000-5000 words and completed by October 31, 2011. Those interested in participating are requested to turn in an abstract of 250-400 words along with a resume by the September 30, 2011.