16th Annual Tagore Lecture: Avidya

Talk by Vidyan Ravinthiran (English, Harvard University) What overlap is there between political, psychological and philosophical ideas of identity, and what role might poetry play in helping their convergence? Discussing his fusion of life-writing and verse criticism, Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir, and his Forward Prize-winning poetry collection, Avidya—both published last year—Vidyan Ravinthiran considers alternatives to the ego-noise that so thoroughly permeates our cultural discourse, including our rhetorics of empowerment and critique. Vidyan Ravinthiran is a Profess