As abandoned remnants of human activity, ruins evoke concerns about the durability of the past, a setting, and of human perception and culture. This talk explores the appearance of ruins in fiction and art set in Afghanistan. In these works syncretic colonial histories uniquely yoked to ruination (through description and setting) raise urgent questions about enduring forms of contemporary coloniality and the agency of any individual actor within a setting. This talk ultimately proposes a theory of the ‘ruin-sublime’ wherein aesthetic works join the material history of colonial desecration to psychic apprehensions to invite new ethically charged orientations towards the future.

Mrinalini Chakravorty, Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary (Columbia UP, 2014), as well as articles on transnationalism, film, Arab women writers, interdisciplinarity, and contemporary global fiction. In Stereotype considers the influence of contemporary South Asian Anglophone novels to illustrate how their play on stereotypes about South Asia provide insight into the material and psychic investments of contemporary imaginative texts: the colonial novel, the transnational film, and the international best-seller. Chakravorty's other essays have appeared in PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, South Asian Review, ARIEL, differences, and in various journals and collections. She received her Ph.D. in English and Critical Theory from the University of California, Irvine. At Virginia, she directs the English department’s Undergraduate Program and the concentration in Modern Literature and Culture. She is at work on two new books, one on representations of global hunger and another on postcolonial dystopias. She is also co-writing a critical biography of Freddie Mercury.