Mr Tanay Gandhi

Research groups

Research interests

• 20th Century French post-foundational philosophy; especially, Ranciere, Foucault, and Merleau-Ponty
• Decolonial and Black radical traditions of thought and approaches to political theory
• Philosophical aesthetics; from 18th Century German aesthetic theory to contemporary approaches
• Postcolonial writing and the politics of literature
• Politics of architecture, space and urbanity

Current research

Tanay’s current research focuses on the politics of literature (one part of his larger PhD project). Using original translations of the work of Namdeo Dhasal and Baburao Bagul, and building on the work of Jacques Ranciere, Fred Moten, and theorisations of Dalit writing from India, his research unfolds a fugitive gesture of refusal immanent to Dalit literature written in 1970s Bombay (now Mumbai), India, and the radical literary politics internal to such fugitivity.

Against attempts to identify in Dalit writing the inscription of some stable, fully-formed vision of Dalit subjectivity, Tanay's research shows the ways in which their work problematises the question of in/visibility – opening an interstitial and fugitive break in which (from within which) they write Dalit manhood precisely as suspension - as the break and broken interstice in the surround of a vision of subjectivity.