Debashish Banerji finds himself performing his liminal and dialogic identities from day to day between a variety of cultures, disciplines and social realities.
Stationary and mobile between various transnational and transepochal zones, Banerji spends his mundane hours offering himself as a site of precarious integration and his transcendental hours observing the simultaneity of location and momentum.
Aspiring to the posthuman subjectivity of Durga with her blur of hands and Nataraja uniting creation, preservation and destruction, stillness and motion, Banerji tries to center his reality in the perpetual motion machine of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s bi-directional yoga.
Culture studies, pre-modern, modern and contemporary Indian, Japanese, Islamic and transnational art histories, Savitri, The Life Divine, Gita and Upanishad, comparative mysticism, subjective science, multimedia authoring, Jazz, Sri Aurobindo, Coomaraswamy, Abanindranath, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Bernard Stiegler, Bourdieu, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and a number of other voices, languages, flavors, styles and texts weave in and out of his expressions, talks, projects, workshops, courses and creative and critical writings.
The text of a world history and a cosmic person in the making, not the post-Enlightenment postnational multicultural globalization narrative, nor the narrative of localized anarchistic cosmo-cultic avataric fundamentalisms, but the amplifying overlap of horizontal cultural hybridities, affective communities of resistance and aspiration towards the re-membering of the subjective-objective body of the Infinite One, is the transitional evolutionary project for which Banerji attempts to make himself an occassion.
L’avenir, it is hoped, beckons.
Debashish Banerji is the Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophy and Culture and the Doshi Professor of Asian Art at the, California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco; Ph.D., Indian Art History, University of California, Los Angeles; MA Computer Science, University of Louisville, KY; BA English Literature, Elphinstone College, Bombay University. (Download CV)
