Seminars

The study of philology in premodern South Asia has almost exclusively focused on texts. This has yielded a number of insights about forms of commentary, text criticism, authorship, and interpretation, but it leaves us no closer to understanding how philology was lived, let alone how it was deployed among and against people in the world. A small but tantalizing collection of Sanskrit oral debate records presents an opportunity to examine philology in its kinetic form, that is, as a technology of making sense of texts that was dynamic, oppositional, and crucial to the exercise of power. This talk examines a single event: in the early 1600s, an upstart king in southwest India hosted rival scholars to debate the mechanisms and metaphysics of death. A close reading of the event affords an opportunity to not only reflect on the remarkable philological expertise of early modern intellectuals in action, but to locate the articulation of philological expertise within asymmetrical fields of power. Here we find that the success of argument had as much to do with its philological acuity as to do with privilege and social status.

Malcolm X is broadly remembered as an icon of the struggle for Black freedom. This was in no small part due to his remarkable oratorical mastery. Within African-American lore, his feats of speech were all the more impressive given the narrative of his “homemade education” while imprisoned, an experience symbolized by the figure of the aardvark. Starting with this peculiar image from his Autobiography, I demonstrate that Malcolm was also a philological thinker who considered the love of study a valid pursuit in its own right. Moreover, I show how Malcolm’s philology, one that viewed words as constitutive of the world, and one that emerged from a popular style of reasoning, might be mobilized in the study of the global African diaspora. In so doing, I also re-cast the history of philology that otherwise privileges an origin story of European exceptionalism. To make this argument, I rely on a close reading of the Autobiography co-written with Alex Haley as well as the journals that he kept during his travels to Africa and the Middle East, informed by but not constrained to the historical record. The result is an image of a Black philology in action.