Regenia Gagnier to Deliver a Keynote Address at the SGNCS World Congress on "Manik Bandyopadhyay, Technological Progress and Democracy, and the State of Decolonizing"

Regenia Gagnier, who holds the Established Chair in English Language and Literature at the University of Exeter, and is founding and co-editor of the Global Circulation Project of Literature Compass, will deliver a keynote address at the SGNCS World Congress in Birmingham 17-20 July 2025. Professor Gagnier's talk is titled "Manik Bandyopadhyay, Technological Progress and Democracy, and the State of Decolonizing."

This lecture approaches the long nineteenth century and globalization through key moments in literature, criticism, and theory: the historical novel in its nineteenth-century formation from Walter Scott and its greatest critic Gyorgy Lukacs; the British empire in India and subject formation; the Bangladeshi novelist Manik Bandyopadhyay and his conflict between tradition and modernity; and our current moment of technological globalization. Gagnier takes up different educationaI models and ideas of progress over the last two centuries, including competitive individualism and communalism, and concludes with our current moment labelled technofeudalism by our contemporary economists (an economic turn from profit to rent and thus from the nineteenth century critics of capital to more recent theorists), our current state of decolonizing, and what kinds of literature might be adequate to it. Gagnier hopes that such moves between past, present, and future, and between cultures, confirm the continuing value of dialectical criticism.

Registration for the congress will soon close.