Ep. 28: Postcolonial and Posthuman World-Making: Introducing Asian Contemplative and Transcultural Studies (ACTS) with Debashish Banerji

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Hosted by Stephen Julich (EWP adjunct faculty, program manager) and Jonathan Kay (PhD student, EWP assistant)

In this episode we meet with East-West Psychology chair Debashish Banerji and discuss his vision and foundation of the new concentration in the EWP department titled Asian Contemplative and Transcultural Studies. Debashish shares his postcolonial vision of ACTS and we discuss how it can situate creative and academic approaches to posthuman world-making. He shares the importance of understanding Asian contemplative traditions in critical relationships to the forces of western globalization and capital which overdetermines Asian cultures through orientalist projection and hegemonic subjugation. Debashish illustrates this idea by describing the modern western understanding of Yoga in the health and culture industries co-opted by capital, and rather brings out yoga as a micro-political praxis of subjective freedom through self-making based on anti-colonialist struggles. We ask how the potentials of previous cultural renaissances and revolutions can productively aid in this aspiration to build a new habitus while also avoiding the dangers of being subjugated to the forces of global capitalism through internalizing and subjugation to new regimes of doxa. Debashish speaks of the importance of the arts in ACTS, and shares how the arts can provide affective experiences which can open one to new liminal languages and performative concepts which are required in psycho-cosmological world-making.

Debashish Banerji is the Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and the Doshi Professor of Asian Art at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is also the Program Chair for the East-West Psychology department. Prior to CIIS, he served as Professor of Indian Studies and Dean of Academics at the University of Philosophical Research, Los Angeles. He has taught as adjunct faculty at the Pasadena City College, University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Irvine. His interests lie in postmodern, postcolonial and cross-cultural approaches to Indian philosophy, psychology and culture. Banerji has curated close to fifteen exhibitions of Indian and Japanese art. He has authored and edited around ten books and art catalogs on major figures of “the Bengal Renaissance” such as the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, the artist Abanindranath Tagore and the spiritual thinker Sri Aurobindo; on Critical Posthumanism, Yoga Psychology and on a variety of creative and art-related projects. His most recent books are Integral Yoga Psychology: Metaphysics and Transformation as Taught by Sri Aurobindo (Lotus Press, 2020) and Meditations on the Isha Upanishad: Tracing the Philosophical Vision of Sri Aurobindo (Sri Aurobindo Samity and Maha Bodhi Publishers, 2019), and Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformative Yoga Psychology based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo (DK Printworld, 2012).