Suchismito Khatua

Bio

If art is contingent rather than necessary, and often distinct from lived experience, how can it be mobilized to effect political change? In broaching this question, Suchismito Khatua’s research girdles the idea of the avant-garde, and its many figurations in a transnational and translational frame. Thus far, Smito has studied, presented, and published on the theory of the avant-garde, modernist “minor”/ “underground” literary cultures in the Bangla, Hindi, and Marathi languages, and concomitant histories of far-left militancy in post-independence India. His current interests span the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, histories of labor, subalternity, and resistance, theories of affect and sexuality, psychoanalysis, and translation.
Smito was formerly affiliated with the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where he worked as a UGC Research Fellow and Undergraduate Course Instructor. In 2022, he was a visiting fellow in the research cluster “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” and the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School at Freie Universität Berlin.
Much of Smito’s thinking on living, and love, sweeps along a scissored trajectory of anarcho-communism and intersectional, anti-assimilationist queer politics. Poetry sustains him.

Education & Certifications

• Master of Arts, University of Calcutta, English (2019)
• Bachelor of Arts, St. Xavier's College, University of Calcutta, English (Honors) (2017)