Preeti Singh @Comics: More than Words presenting 'Cartooning Crisis: Graphic Narratives from the Indian National Emergency (1975-77)

Dear students and faculty, 

We are very excited to announce the last event for the Fall quarter of the Comics: More than Words Research Unit, supported by the DLCL department and kindly sponsored by the English and Art History Departments.  

We will be hosting Preeti Singh, Ph.D. Candidate in English at the Ohio State University, presenting ‘Cartooning Crisis: Graphic Narratives from the Indian National Emergency (1975-1977)’.

The event will take place via Zoom, on December 1st at 12pm (PDT) and we look forward to seeing you there. To register, please follow this link.

Here is a brief description of her talk and her bio.

Cartooning Crisis: Graphic Narratives from the Indian National Emergency(1975-1977)

This talk will focus on political cartoons and graphic narratives about the national Emergency declared by Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975 until its withdrawal on March 21, 1977. With examples drawn from the 1970s and contemporary India, we will reflect on how graphic narratives mediate the experience and memories of postcolonial crises. We will situate the genre of the political cartoon and long-form graphic narratives within the broader context of visual dissent during the Emergency to reflect on the following questions:  What is the relationship between comics and democracy? In what ways do political cartoons on the Emergency counter the censoring regimes of the time? Do they challenge popular discourses on the Emergency or reify them?

Preeti Singh is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at The Ohio State University and an affiliated fellow at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. She researches and teaches postcolonial studies and Global Anglophone literature with a focus on twentieth and twenty-first-century South Asian and South Asian diasporic writing. She is especially interested in literary expressions of political and social crisis in the decolonization era, discourses of human rights, and the contemporary rhetoric and theories of populism. Her doctoral dissertation titled Postcolonial Exceptions: Cultural Lives of the Indian National Emergency (1975-1977) examines representations of the widely memorialized national Emergency declared by Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975. This project reads a range of genres- novels, theatre, cinema, and political cartoons, to script a cultural history of post-independence India through the prism of the ‘Emergency’.

In preparation for the talk and the subsequent discussion, please take a look at these political cartoons and excerpts from Delhi Calm by Vishwajyoti Ghosh.

If you would like to follow our next events and be informed of the other activities of the group, please contact Cynthia (cinziag [at] stanford.edu (cinziag[at]stanford[dot]edu)) to be added to our Comics mailing list: comicsru21 [at] stanford.edu (comicsru21[at]stanford[dot]edu).

With our best wishes for the new school year,

Cristian Felipe Soler (cfsoler [at] stanford.edu (cfsoler[at]stanford[dot]edu)) 

Cynthia Laura Vialle-Giancotti (cinziag [at] stanford.edu (cinziag[at]stanford[dot]edu))