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Faculty Members Staff |
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Background: I grew up in an India where movies still began with a Films Division documentary heavy with the theme of development and ended with the national anthem. My high school finals in Madras coincided with the defeat of Mrs Gandhi’s Congress party in the parliamentary elections of 1977 and the resounding rejection of the Emergency. I did my Bachelor’s from Loyola College (majoring in Chemistry), and my Master’s from the Center for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. I came to the United States in 1983, and took my doctorate in political science from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University in upstate New York. After a two-year visiting appointment at nearby Colgate, I joined Manoa in 1990 and have been here since. I enjoy reading, especially south Asian writing in English, playing tennis, and hanging out on the beach when I can. I am a life-member of the world’s largest club of the perennially disappointed – the Indian cricket fan – and firmly believe that behind every sub-continental academic lies a failed cricketer. Having recently survived chairing the department (2000-2003), I look forward to many years with my affable colleagues in one of the loveliest places on this planet.
Research Interests: My work so far has centered on nationalism, ethnic identity and conflict, identity politics, and postcolonial studies, located primarily around India and Sri Lanka. I am currently working on some essays dealing with the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, the culture of Indian foreign policy making, the silent presence of race in discourses of international relations, diasporic forms of Indian nationalism, and other eclectic topics.
Selected publications:
Postcolonial Insecurities: India, Sri Lanka and the Question of Nationhood. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000).
"An Inarticulate Imperialism: Dubya, Afghanistan and the American Century" in Alternatives: Turkish Journal of International Affairs, vol.1, no. 2, Summer 2002.
Methodical Worlds: Partition, Secularism, and Communalism in India, Alternatives 27, 2 (2002): 217-242. A Special Issue on "Partition" edited by Sankaran Krishna and R.B.J. Walker.
In One Inning: National Identity in Post-Colonial Times, Geeta Chowdhury and Sheila Nair (eds.), Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class (London and New York: Routledge Press, 2002): 170-183.
Armed Struggle as a Metaphor in the War Against Terrorism, Theory and Event 5, 4 (2002). Special Issue "Reflections On September 11th, 2001." Co-authored with Neal Milner and Kathy Ferguson. (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.4ferguson_01.html)Race, Amnesia and the Education of International Relations, Alternatives 26, 4 (2001): 401-424.
Divergent Narratives: Dravidian and Tamil Eelamist Nationalisms, Michael Roberts (ed), Collective Identities Revisited, Volume II. Colombo: Marga Press, 1998): 315-346.
Cartographic Anxiety: Mapping the Body Politic in India, Hayward Alker Jr. & Michael Shapiro (eds.), Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities (Minnesota, 1996): 193-215.
The Importance of Being Ironic: A Postcolonial View on Critical International Relations, Alternatives 18, 3 (1993): 385-417.
William Connolly, The Ethos Of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnnesota Press, 1999). Reviewed for Theory and Event 5,4 (2002). (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.4krishna.html)
Selected Courses taught:
Comparative Politics (POLS 305): Global and Asia-Pacific Politics:
A Comparative Approach: This mandatory course examines the global and
inter-related nature of political and economic development over the last
few centuries. The approach taken regards the emergence of the western
first-world and the non-western third world as inter-related and connected
processes. It emphasizes questions such as: what have been the historical
relationships between the developed, capitalist countries of this world
and those in the third world; what has been the record of economic development,
political change, and social and individual freedoms in the western and
non-western worlds; what have been the impacts of various economic developmental
strategies and models on various sections of the populations of first
and third world countries; how does the history of Hawaii reflect the
history of capitalism and colonialism in the last two centuries.
The following texts are required for this course.
Comparative Politics (POLS 640): The Material Economies of Globalization: This course attempts to understand the contemporary discourse on Globalization against a longer, historical frame-work that emphasizes international political-economy, western expansion, colonial conquest, and the emergence of modernity on a world-scale. Broadly, it sees the recent acceleration in the mobility of capital, the consequent space-time compression, and the various political, economic, cultural and social manifestations of these changes, as part of a longer historical process that emerged in 1492 with the discovery of the new world by Columbus, and was thereafter marked by the gradual consolidation of planet-wide system of production for the market and for exchange. In other words, this course will look at global political-economy through both contemporary lenses and through works attendant to the five-century long narrative of emerging modernity.
This course is anchored around the following books:
In addition, I will list a number of other supplementary
readings that constitute the intellectual context of the above books.
Comparative Politics (POLS 740): States, Citizens and Subjects:
This graduate seminar in comparative politics focuses on the hyphen that
links/separates "nation-state". It will examine the career of
the nation in modern times - and its relationship to the various fragments
that constitute both its supposedly retrogressive rivals (ethnicity, for
instance) and the supplements that make the nation itself possible. We
will read a selection of recent books and articles/ book chapters surrounding
these themes to get a sense of the highly charged and contested terrain
that constitutes the national question at this point in time.
The course will be anchored around the following books:
Comparative Politics (POLS 740): Critical Comparative Politics: This seminar course takes a somewhat unconventional look at the sub-discipline of Comparative Politics. Until recent times, the field was dominated by a handful of schools or approaches: modernization theory, the dependency school, and world-systems analyses pretty much covered the range of theoretical frameworks used to analyze the politics of developing societies. In the last decade, however, such approaches have seemed increasingly inadequate in capturing a whole slew of developments: the collapse of the ‘socialist’ or communist bloc; the re-emergence of genocidal conflicts in the name of ‘ethnicity’; the vast increase in numbers of peoples classified as aberrations within the state-centric system (migrants, refugees, illegal aliens, prisoners of war etc.); the increasing sophistication and global reach of so-called guerrilla movements; a serious erosion of the state’s monopoly over the means of coercion; a dilution of state sovereignty in the face of accelerated global flows of finance, commodities, fashions and information, and so on. Rather than trying to restore the ‘normalcy’ of the field of comparative politics, this seminar focuses on readings that attempt to chart these new developments without being invested in older frameworks locked in a nationalist imaginary. One of the (unsurprising) results is that none of the books we will be looking at this semester emerge from comparative politics (or even political science) - and for that very reason allow us to engage in a critical and self-reflexive dissection of this discipline: what does it take for granted and what are the political consequences of such received wisdom?
Among our readings will be the following:
Comparative Politics (POLS 640): Nation/Ethnicity and Insecurity. This graduate course approaches the sub-discipline of comparative politics in a somewhat unusual way: it constitutes an intensive examination and critical deconstruction of the very concepts, categories and units of analysis that sub-discipline rests upon. We will undertake genealogical readings of ideas such as the nation, ethnic groups, national and ethnic identity, and try to see how they are mutually constitutive, how they produce and reproduce each other, and how they together combine to create the current politics of insecurity in the global order. The ethic animating this course is one that does not take the current spatialization of our world as a given, but tries to be critical and reflexive about the emergence and consolidation of such a worlding. It is especially concerned with seeing how the modernist imaginary is one that relentlessly, and unsuccessfully, attempts to endow every unit of territory with a uniform, pulverized, and singular notion of identity.
The following books will anchor the course:
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