Deep in the forests, under the pretense of battling Maoist guerillas, the Indian government is waging a vicious total war against its own citizens—a war undocumented by a weak domestic press and fostered by corporations eager to exploit the rare minerals buried in tribal lands. Chronicling her months spent living with the rebel guerillas in the forests, Roy addresses the much larger question of whether global capitalism will tolerate any societies existing outside of its colossal control.

A reading by

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy (c) Sanjay Kak

Wednesday November 9^th 2011

7.00 PM – 9.00 PM

The Proshansky Auditorium

Cuny Graduate Center

365 Fifth Ave at 34th Street

Free and open to the public

RSVP required

Tickets sold out!

Check back here for video from the event!

Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. The novel has been translated into dozens of languages worldwide.

She has written several non-fiction books, including The Cost of Living, Power Politics, War Talk, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, and Public Power in the Age of Empire. Roy was featured in the BBC television documentary Dam/age, which is about the struggle against big dams in India. A collection of interviews with Arundhati Roy by David Barsamian was published as The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile. Her recent work includes Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, and a contribution to the forthcoming anthology Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Her latest book, Walking with the Comrades was just published by Penguin Books. Roy is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize.

In conversation with Peter Hitchcock and Ruthie Gilmore

Peter Hitchcock, Acting Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and Professor of English, Women’s Studies, and Film Studies at the City University of New York, Graduate School and University Center, and at Baruch College, CUNY. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Shanghai University. His most recent publications are The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford University Press, 2010) and Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism ( University of Illinois Press, 2003). He has been the Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics since 2008.

Ruthie Gilmore, Acting Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and Professor of Geography in the doctoral program in Earth and Environmental Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Ruthie is known as an activist as well as an intellectual and is the former president of the American Studies Association (ASA). She examined how political and economic forces produced California’s prison boom in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007), which was recognized by ASA with its Lora Romero First Book Award. Her work is widely anthologized, including in the groundbreaking anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and Andrea Smith (South End Press, 2007). Gilmore’s wide-ranging research interests also include race and gender, labor and social movements, uneven development, and the African diaspora. She comes to the Graduate Center at CUNY from the University of Southern California, where she taught courses in race and ethnicity, economic geography, and political geography, was the founding chair of the department of American studies and ethnicity, and won the USC-Mellon Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring. She also works regularly with community groups and grassroots organizations and is known for the broad accessibility of her research. She holds a Ph.D. in economic geography and social theory from Rutgers University.

Co-sponsored by the CUNY Committee on Globalization and Social Change and the Center for Humanities