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Anti-identitarian Aesthetics in an Era of New Colonialisms
(University of Amsterdam, 2024-)

Taking up the exemplary case of contemporary postcolonial India and the Indian diasporas, this project aims to contribute to a critical self-understanding of the different anticolonial options that are emerging in response to rising authoritarian and antidemocratic tendencies in postcolonial nations.

Poetic Understanding and Political Community: Actualizing Plurality through Poetry
(PhD project, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, 2016-2022)

In this project, I propose an intersubjective pragmatist framework for reading poetry that takes the actualization of a decolonial and anti-identitarian political plurality as the basis of poetry’s politicality. At its core is the concept of ‘poetic understanding’: a transformative quality of understanding that is a necessarily dynamic, contingent, non-hierarchical, and anti-identitarian process of transformation and constitution, where who I am comes to be constituted in my process of understanding, as does who the other is. I develop this framework by bringing together four distinct conceptual fields: I build on Hannah Arendt’s theory of political plurality, Édouard Glissant’s concepts of relation and opacity, John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of aesthetic experience, and Sylvia Wynter’s model of decipherment to examine poetry as a site of intersubjective transformation, where a genuine plurality of relation in interaction, divested of discriminatory and hierarchizing mechanics, can be actualized. In such a conceptualization of poetic understanding, I argue, lies an as-yet-underestimated cornerstone of solidary understanding, and the crux of poetry’s political contribution.

Supervisors: Prof. Ellen Rutten, Prof. Josef Früchtl
(Defense date: 11 November 2022)

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Forthcoming Publications:

Nadkarni, Divya. “Glissant, Plurality, and the Poetics of Public World-Relation.” Parallax. Special Issue, Literature and Public World-Making. (2024)

Nadkarni, Divya. “Notes Towards a Decolonial Praxis of Cultural Analysis.” Chap. In Cultural Analysis, ca. 2033, edited by Murat Aydemir, Aylin Kuryel, and Noa Roei. Amsterdam University Press, 2024.

Nadkarni, Divya. “One with Others/One Among Others: The Labor of Solidary Understanding.” Chap. In Essays on C.D. Wright, edited by Rachel Trousdale. University of Michigan Press, 2025.

Nadkarni, Divya. "The ‘oblique poetics’ of decolonial relation: Michelle Mohabeer’s Queer Coolie-tudes." Chap. In Queer  Diaspora Studies and Film Studies in conversation (2025/26)

2023 -

Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam

2022 - 2023

Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam
- Philosophy, Race, Media, and the Arts (BA Seminar) (Nov - Dec 2022)

Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam
- Intercultural Dialogues (MA Seminar) (Sep - Oct 2022)
- Poetic, Rhetorical and Visual Analysis (BA Seminar) (Sep - Oct 2022)
- Narratology and Discourse Analysis  (BA Seminar) (Nov 2022 - Jan 2023)
- Historicism, Anachronism, Memory: How Not to Take Contexts for Granted (BA Seminar) (Apr - June 2023)

2019 - 2022

Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis, BA, University of Amsterdam
- Literary Worlds (Lecture) (Feb - Mar 2022)
- Analysis and Interpretation (Seminar) (Oct 2020 - Jan 2021)
- Contexts and Frames (Seminar) (Apr - Jun 2020)
- BA Thesis supervision (Thesis) (Feb - June 2020)
- Aesthetics and Politics (Lecture) (Sep - Oct 2019)

Academic Core, BA, Amsterdam University College
- Academic Writing Skills (Core course) (Sep -Dec 2019)

Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE), BA, Amsterdam
- Race, Gender, Sexuality and Popular Culture (May - June 2019)

2018 -2019

Academic Core, BA, Amsterdam University College
- Academic Writing Skills (Core course) (Sep - Dec 2018)

2012-2014

Lecturer BA, Literary and English Studies
Ramnarain Ruia College, University of Mumbai (Mumbai, India)
Courses :
- Introduction to Postcolonial literatures
- Romantic and Victorian literature
- British Modernism
- Introduction to literary theory
- Introduction to Feminism
- 20th century American Literature
- Contemporary Indian English literature